Aria will change everything!
Lunar Elven Sanctuary, Hollow Earth Depths
Nearly four days had passed since Morgana Le Fay and Sorcha of the Crimson Hand had encountered the entity known as Nyx, along with a nearly dissolved Poimandres, in the desolate depths of Hollow Earth. Under the constant care of the Moon Elven healers and the subtle restorative energy of the Aluxes who had returned wounded from the front, an astonishing change had begun to manifest.
The transformation was slow, almost painful to watch. The oppressive, vast darkness that had been Nyx's mantle was gradually retreating from Eleonora like a black tide receding from a desolate shore. Where before there had been a terrifying majesty and a chaotic energy that chilled the soul, now a fragility emerged, an almost human vulnerability, albeit tinged with the ethereal grace of her Moon Elven heritage. Her form, once towering and sharp as obsidian, softened, losing the hard edges of Chaos. Her hair, once a storm of living shadows, now fell straighter, regaining a dark color with barely a glimmer of the lunar silver of her people. Her eyes, when briefly opened, no longer burned with the red fire or black void of Nyx, but instead showed a stormy gray, clouded with confusion and unfathomable pain.
"Each day," the ancient elven healer, Lyraella, had remarked to Morgana with reverent awe, "a little more of the Master Eleonora who once led our people in exile returns. The Greater Shadow, the one that devoured her, withdraws, like a sated beast abandoning its prey, believing it dead."
Morgana and Sorcha, witnessing this almost miraculous reversal, were astonished. They had seen Chaos magic corrupt and consume, but rarely had they witnessed such a fundamental retreat, a seeming purge of such primordial influence. Poimandres, at her side, remained a vast, wounded shadow, but even his chaotic energy seemed less erratic, more contained, as if his Herald's transformation would affect him as well.
As Eleonora recovered further, she began to speak in lucid moments, her voice faint, barely a whisper, but unmistakably that of the former Mistress of Umbra, not the Dark Queen.
"The power of Chaos..." she murmured one day, her eyes fixed on the ceiling of the luminescent cavern, "is a bottomless ocean, Morgana, Sorcha. You drown in its immensity, believing you are flying, that you are free. Nyx... she was the mask Chaos forced me to wear, or perhaps... the mask I chose for myself in my blindness, in my arrogance, in my desperate longing for a power I believed would protect me from pain, from loss..." A shudder ran through her. "I remember fragments... like a fevered nightmare, full of shadows and screams. The pain I caused... the manipulations... the darkness I sowed..." Her voice broke. "It was not me... and yet, she wore my face, used my memories as weapons."
But amid these fragments of self-awareness and horror at her actions as Nyx, one concern dominated her thoughts, a question she repeated with feverish urgency whenever her strength allowed.
"Aria..." she gasped, her eyes desperately searching Morgana's or Sorcha's. "My Aria... where is she? Is she safe in that... hornets' nest in Cancún? Please tell me! Was she still alive when... when I fell into the darkness of Cthulhu's attack?"
The intensity of her concern for the young mage was a flame that seemed to consume her meager energy. She clutched at Sorcha's hand, her fingers cold and trembling. "The Netlin... Amitiel... and that abomination of the Abyss... They will all see her as a threat or a tool! Her light... I felt it when our minds touched briefly, before everything turned to darkness for me. It was so bright, so pure... but also so horribly exposed on your surface world!"
Morgana, with her Fae astuteness, observed Eleonora's intensity. Her concern for this 'Aria,' she thought, far transcends that of a mere teacher for a distinguished student. It's... visceral. Primal. Almost like the bond that unites a wolf and her cub. What powerful bond unites them, a bond that not even Chaos could completely erase from Eleonora?
Sorcha, more directly and perhaps remembering the almost filial devotion that Eleonora herself had inspired in her in the early days of the Scarlet Circle, dared to ask. "Eleonora, your anguish for the young mage is... palpable. Yes, she is powerful, we know she is crucial to the defense of the surface. But your fear... seems like that of a mother fearing for the life of her only child in the midst of a war."
Eleonora looked away, and a single tear, the first they had seen on her since waking, traced a furrow on her pale cheek. "She is... more than a student to me, Sorcha," she whispered.
Her voice cracked. "It is... all that remains of a promise I made long ago. A light I swore to protect with my life, a light that I myself, as Nyx, failed in the most terrible way."
She tried to sit up, a new and desperate strength animating her fragile body. "I must go... I must reach her. I must warn her... protect her... before it's too late. She is the key, don't you understand? One way or another, for light or for darkness, Aria will change everything!"
The mystery of the connection between Eleonora and Aria deepened, but the former Master's urgency was undeniable. She had returned from the abyss of Chaos, and her first and most overwhelming thought was not of lost power or cosmic war, but of the safety of a young, fiery-haired mage in distant, besieged Cancún. Could Aria be someone so profoundly special to Eleonora, an anchor to the light Eleonora herself had lost and now, perhaps, desperately longed to rediscover through her, or at least to protect from the darkness she knew so well? The answer seemed to burn in the intensity of her recovered gaze.