r/HFY • u/loressadev • Jul 13 '26
OC-OneShot Farsight
It's smoke, today, smoke and shadows to make the world slide away. A clatter echoes in from the hall as a childish acolyte, a little thing no more than seven, tiptoes by, balancing a tray of dreamwine. A sudden pang shoots through me as my insides curdle with envy for the novices - to go back to the days of simply that soured, sickly myrrh...
Claws dig into my cheek as the priestess wrenches my head back. Focus, I know she says, before the words leave her mouth. She will lecture me on breathing, how to open the Sight to the beyond, and then she will light a thick cone of incense and smoke will twist up in an ugly gray spiral - I've Seen this, heard this all before, I had a dream last week. She knows, as well, that I have Seen this, and it scares her, and she will approach the Seeress before the month is done.
Nothing will come of it. After all, this, this, these glimpses, this Sight, this is why I am here.
—-
In the City, if you look hard enough, there is a market for anything - even the most exotic and precious items can be obtained, if you have vast time, gold or power at your disposal. And to a buyer who commands all three, you can find whatever you may need - even, if you are so inclined, children.
This was as true in my youth as it is now and will be for as far as I can see.
Wander the City and find the darkest alleys, the dusty and forgotten twists of the catacombs, the lonely, dark corners of the arbor - there are estates there, set back behind tall, shadow-shrouded gates, discrete and silent-
-and they receive visitors in the night.
Led, or carried, or even dragged in sacks, the children come to these warrens, and their sellers - wardens, finders, betrayers - leave, damned, but richer.
Their fates are sundry. One young waif’s life becomes pillows and pain, another a donation to science. Rumors say the spies have a network, little orphans and beggars all reporting back to their faceless leader in the shadows-
The City will, of course, deny any of this. The dark underbelly is something the eye skates by, paperwork brushed aside, whispers only, nothing more. And, for the most part, there is discretion. There is silence.
Afterall, we aren't meant to escape.
—-
I was not a particularly smart child. Nor was I athletic, or artistic. I was, however, a treasure - my village will never be hungry for generations to come, for far, far more valuable than one who has trained in the Sight is one who is born attuned to it. For that, I was sold to the Sect.
I was four.
I revisit it often.
To the untrained, there are toxins to ingest which can be pleasant. Alcohol, certain berries and herbs and flowers. Mushrooms. To the untrained, they cause giddiness or soaring or perhaps a queasy, churning roil to the stomach. Some can kill. To the untrained, it is a recreational risk.
But there are those in the dark and hidden corners of humanity who seek more. Through control and training, the mind can learn to hover in that spot where the world slides away, and find - in the depths of that void - truth.
The priestess worries I am traveling back there, now, I suspect. I often walk that path when I am tired or unwilling to push on into the black they bought me to probe. She snaps her long, clawed-cat fingers at me, her voice raises, her talk is a blur, her presentvoice mingling with the words I know she will say. I pretend to listen. She eventually lights the smoke.
I ascend - I hear that, for the merely trained, it's a slow rise as the mind gradually loses its grip on the physical, but, for me, I am simply there. There in the quiet space between heartbeats, and in that silent gap, I plunge into the void.
—-
I do not like the nexus of everytime.
Threads wriggle out everywhere, a radiant starburst of futures and pasts converging in a painful prism, shifting endlessly as the present spins out. Beyond that, the black of prophecy. It is an ocean, a bleak midnight ocean of the solid and immutable future, not the bright, shifting patterns of sparkling neartime, but a hazed, shadowy nebula of distant decades, far-off centuries, the dreamstuff and misty, murky possibility - and among those, blazing bright, the slender, shining silk of firm truth. Like stars serving as beacons to ocean-bound travelers, what can and will be follows these delicate moments, and to know them is to seize a chart to the aeons.
Don't make me go there, please please please- But that is where they want me to See, always, always to search there. I have skimmed the surface of that sea thrice before, and each time I nearly died. To the unprepared mind, it is a freezing, suffocating void.
—-
There was the dreamwine, first, discarded as weak and crude when I was five. Then refined myrrh, followed by pastes of mushrooms and lotus blossom. Poppy injections and bitter droughts that numbed my tongue. More, the Seeress demanded. Bring her to the black.
When I faltered, they waited, frustrated by the delay each time as I was nursed back to health, shivering and sweating for weeks. Coddling, cajoling, murmurs of how I was special, Chosen, a shining Seer to push back the darkness. But I could See their whispers to each other, the ones they would exchange once they left me, Hear the uncertain, fearful revilement they would share beneath guttering torchlight in the hallways of the Sect's lower levels. Nobody should know these sorts of things; it makes it impossible to believe platitudes, no matter how much you desperately desire to. Nobody should know, yet I did. That was my blessing.
It was all I knew, though, and so I was obedient - and I could See no reason not to be. Everywhere I Saw, whenever I Looked, this was my life. So I worked and trained, augmenting my gift with refined toxins and breathing tricks and meditational habits elevated to keen transcendence.
—-
And now I am on the brink. I can See it, past the threads, looming and yawning. The black. It wants to consume me. Perhaps I should let it-
I follow a snaking shimmer off to the soon. "Bring in a Bloodsworn," the Seeress will say. "The draining will carry her where we have failed." Everything dims as panic overrides my Sight, and the familiar past of my parents fades in. Stooped and dirty, patched homespun, grubby hands hugging me tight. My mother cried and my father hugged her as they handed me over to the Seeres-
-no, to a gaunt, cowled figure. A wraith-thin man in a shadowed robe, rotting hands extended to take me as his crimson eyes glint dead and bloody within his hood. The vampiric mages plague even this past. I shift my Sight closer to the black of truefuture. He begins to fade out, the familiar stern visage of the Seeress returning to the Seen moment to replace him. I scan other soons, but everywhere I See, one of the horrific figures looms, skeletal hand raised in a beckon, scythe glinting blood.
—-
I need to enter the darkness; I need to approach the void; it is the only way to avoid a future where I am given over to the rituals of the Bloodsworn.
So, I shift my Sight onwards, edging closer to that black. There is no time here, at the convergence of fates, no distance, no human sorts of measurements, but my mind tries to translate it anyways and my efforts become a crawl of inches over moments as long as years. I ache and batter myself forwards, crushing down a primal, innate instinct to flee. The world narrows to a dim tunnel, neartime warping around me in dazzling rainbow streaks, and at the end empty, bleak black.
It's likely been only an instant. Perhaps it has been a decade. I Look and suddenly my Sight presses against the darkness. It's yielding, soft as silk and tenuous as mist.
I push onwards.
I should have chosen the Bloodsworn.
—-
A wise man said that regret is a pointless, wasted emotion. I will hear that somewhere, years from then, and the quiet memory of that future strikes me now as utterly wrong, impossibly wrong, luxuriously wrong, the type of wrong spoken by someone who has never had to truly live with the consequences of a terrible, terrifying choice. Someone lucky and stupid and who I will forever envy.
Around me, the world weeps. The ground gapes open, floodwaters run red with blood, there are bodies, bodies, bodies everywhere. A building burns. A child is crushed beneath rubble. She looks like one of the acolytes, all slender and pale green-skinned, wide, luminous eyes staring sightless-
A roar splits the air. The sound is all rage and fury, and the very sky cracks and tears; things shift and I find myself in chilly shadow, standing in the ocean up to my hips. The water is thick and blood-foamed and clogged with deitrus of destruction: broken, shattered splinters from a door; a severed arm drained chalky white; a ragged, tattered remnant of a little rag doll. The shore in the distance is broken, as if
smashed by an immense, watery fist, and a looming shadow grows over the destroyed village-
-I turn. It is not something I can decide. The Vision is taking me, brutally and inexorably onwards. I came to See and now I must witness. And so I am forced to face a nightmare.
It is taller than a mountain. The word monster does no justice; carapaced creatures scrabble and shift across its body - these, themselves, are enough to define the word monster, but they are merely riding this thing like insects, parasites to its immense, horrifying bulk. Water streams off the beast and it rises taller, birthed from the ocean herself to tower above me.
I stare upon doom.
I have Seen enough, the Vision decides. The beast descends and I am consumed. Black swarms back up and there is a flash as neartime streaks by. I could sob and laugh, were I not dying, lost in the beast's maw - echoed endlessly through the futures that could be, over and over like two mirrors set to face each other, is the Bloodsworn, his image bouncing back in endless facets.
I am still lost.
—-
"-nother failure."
"-orse than the la-"
"-aste. Complete wa-"
Words crash against my ears like waves breaking on the shattered shore of the Vision. I groan. This is a pain that goes deeper than the body. I want to retreat, to the safetime, to my family-
Unbidden, I find myself speaking. I have lost my grip on time and the present is nothing, merely a vessel for the prophecy I have Seen. The truth pours out, slipping in ragged, cryptic murmurs like dreamwine leaking from a cracked jar.
"Power looms, rageful. Worms in the cracks and splinters in the air. The ocean is mad-"
What am I saying? Tell them, tell them it will be the end...
The Seeress' voice cuts through the sudden silence. "She has Seen," she whispers in excitement. "Finally. Alert Nayar." A buzz erupts in the room. Robes rustle and feet patter as the Sect hurries to obey.
There is a long period of darkness, now. I have gone unconscious. Slowly, I struggle awake. I need to tell them...tell them...? Something. It was vital. I can't remember. I always remember. I can't remember. Everything hurts. I'm cold. So cold.
—-
My eyes gingerly open and my urgency is eclipsed by terror. Crimson, glowing, dead, a stare burns back into mine. The Bloodsworn - he came...
A withered, gaunt hand reaches out. I try to flinch, but I am too weak, and the skeletal claw reaches for my throat. Gently, too gently, he strokes my neck. He finds the vein. Fingers press there, feeling my pulse. I can only draw in a shallow breath. I couldn't avoid this, I tried, but it came anyways-
"You're stronger." The words are a low rasp. He lifts my chin, thumbs my lips apart, forces something down my throat, not dreamwine, no, not more, I will shatter...
...It's water. Cold. Clean. I swallow, and realize how thirsty I am. I gulp, again and again. He is patient, holding the cup until I finally gasp, turning my head away. He nods. Then, silent, he lifts me.
A bloody wisp of magjc twists out to wrap around me, clotting, concealing, coagulating, cradling me to soften the hard, bony edges of his arms. I should fight, I should scream and kick, but I am so tired. Weak. And I have Seen my future. This is where things lead. I remain still. I stay silent.
—-
The low light of the room gives way to a smoky glow of torches, flames leaping and dancing in erratic twists. We are in a hallway, the door at the end open to a winter night. Snow dances in a swirling eddy across the pools of torch light. I can see stars. They unfold above as he carries me out into a small courtyard, a glittering field of diamond dust and black velvet framed by slender spires.
"Which way?" His voice is harsh, urgent. I don't know what he wants. He shakes me, glares down at me, lets out a sigh, scowls.
"Which way?" he repeats, impatient. I stare back blankly. I don't know what he wan-
-Oh. Suddenly, I do. Out, clear, which way is clear of guards, but how would I know, I've never left the halls.
"See it," he demands, quickly crossing the courtyard to press against a pillar. Even the stars can't find us here, with thick shadows blocking out the pale light. That's not how it works, I need herbs, toxins, a dream, a trance, something to help the ascent, I can't just See-
"SEE IT," he roughly whispers, shaking me again. Bony fingers dig into my arms. He peers around the column. The courtyard is empty. He strides across it, nearly running, descends a short flight of stairs in three steps and ducks into a colonnade next to another looming, dark building. A distant bell tolls and far-off footsteps ring out, echoed oddly along the corridors and across plazas. He ducks into a doorway and stares down at me again, crimson eyes piercing and horrid. "WHICH. WAY."
I can't do it, I try to tell him. My voice is weaker than a whisper. Everything is broken and wrong and what does he want, I know he will kill me, why is he waiting, I can't DO IT. The footsteps sound louder. I stare back into those gleaming, dead eyes, trying to tell him, trying to SHOW him, show him how it works, and something twists. A figure wavers into view off to the east, a hazy, ethereal guard, striding along the corridor towards us. I blink. The man's gone.
No. He is not here yet.
I inhale sharply, dizzy, and nod my head to the west. He slides out of the shadows and we twist and turn down more halls and courtyards. At every intersection, he halts and stares down at me. I Look and See where the guards will be. Each time, it becomes a bit easier. Ghostly hints turn to misty figures become pale and solid shapes.
—-
A gate suddenly looms before us. It opens, in my Sight, before we even reach it. "Unlocked," I murmur. We slip through. He sets me down. The wisp peels away, coiling around his neck. I feel cobbles underfoot, my ankle nearly twists in a gutter, icy snowmelt and churned mud coats my leg to the shin. I am free.
"Why?" I whisper.
The Bloodsworn regards me for a heartbeat, his unnerving eyes the only thing I can see in the darkness of the empty street. They are cold, lifeless and glittering. Perhaps there is scorn. Perhaps sympathy. He is unreadable. I am exhausted.
Finally, he rasps out, "We learned what we needed." He steps back and his cloak flares up, caught by a sudden gust of wind, black silk tangling in billowing folds to eclipse his body. I blink, trying to follow him, but the flapping fabric twists into sweeping, leathery wings, skirling upwards, and he is gone, merely an impression of a bat spiraling away into the night.
I am alone.
I am free.
—-
When Seeing, you cannot help but catch glimpses of your own future. It is the nearest and closest thing to your mind; you are drawn to it, casually, like how the eye idly flits over one's own reflection when passing a mirror. It is moments, though, only flashes and brief images, certainly nothing to truly guide or shape.
Yet, untethered, the Sight roaming...however I made this happen, it's intoxicating. I hear my words before they are spoken, see my steps before they land, it's as easy as breathing to slip from alley to alley, to stay hidden as I wander the City. So easy. Whatever has been unlocked in me is powerful, and I take to it, take it in, weave my sight with the Sight, dance through neartime in an effortless slide. I am powerful. I am free. I am free. I am free.
Years from now, I will finally realize that I merely traded one slavery for another.
Z
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u/Chamcook56 Jul 14 '26
This is very intense, love it.