The price of power often came at sacrifice.
It was a law of fel magic that Safrona initially did not think could apply to such a basic evocation as the Eye. It went underused, as she often relied instead on the phased figure of her succubus to scout ahead if needed. But as Safrona decided to evolve her abilities in summoning, it only seemed sensible to strengthen the Eye and push this trivial connection to the next plateau as well.
The dispractice and blind arrogance cost the Warlock senses she did not know how to function without. The punishment came without pain, only the dread feeling of the ritualistic channel fizzling and failing her. The fiery thread of magic dying at her fingertips was the last sight her eyes were granted.
A shriek echoed in the chambers below the Sojourn, more outrage than fear, though the sound was laced with its aura of panic. She heard the shadows waft into the chamber, sensing her beloved Soulsinger - even in her blindness she reached in the direction of his puzzled voice, needing the solid sanctum of his arms in that moment more than ever. But she would not cry. She would not dare mark this failure with tears.
Isolation. Safrona did not leave the altar chamber stinking of her failure, did not drink, did not eat. She sunk into her own outrage, fuming with this pitiful blindness, this vulnerability. No one could see her this way, Courier or no. The smallest summon, the most unused spell in her arsenal, the Eye of Gul'dan had been nothing to her until now. Now it had effectively become her curse. This stupid, useless, novice spell. And it had taken her sight! Fuming at every failed attempt to reconnect to the Eye and take her sight back, even the First gave the irate Harvester her space.
Paranoia gripped her as blind sight began to shift into abyssal darkness, shadows winding, writhing. The desire and desperation to see was answered in a way, shadowed vision opening upon nothing she recognized, faces foreign to her, blurred expanses. Heavy words in the Forgotten Tongue tried to wrap around her mind, causing her eye sockets to ache, head throbbing. A giant eye opened in the ceiling of the chamber, staring directly onto herself, pupil swirling. Vertigo and the pounding migraine was a vicious combination through her tender flesh, urging her to vomit. The eye dissolved from the ceiling.
She finally began to connect through the Eye in brief flares of hazy vision, but she had not yet been able to maintain it. Still, she imprisoned herself to the chambers, knowing that her blindness could be a handicap as well as a threat. Power evolved in unforseen ways, and she would not give up until this too was conquered. It had not been a curse, or a punishment, her blindness. It was a test, she came to realize, and there were flares of progress.
She felt her Soulsinger's eyes boring into her as she attempted to remain concentrated on the floor of the chamber. She bothered with a bath upstairs once, but her neglect of food and drink was obvious. "If ya don' want ta' eat, don'." His voice seemed to throw across the chamber around her, omnipresent. "When ya body grows weaker an' the daemons sense it, start taking over ya body, I'll simply end ya and then myself."
"Stop this grim talk," the warlock muttered, pulling herself up from the cold floor, mildly irritated. Her voice became brittle, thickening with a pretense of emotional fallout she was consistently holding herself up from. "I am supposed to be your Eyes. And I feel I have failed us both." A clear of her throat, and she smoothed her tone to quiet resolve. "But I will rise from this. I must." Safrona offered a hand in the dark for him to take, the blind warlock presenting herself rather than blindly grope for him in the low light. "I'll get some food in me if that sets you off this dark talk. But keep me like your best secret in the Sojourn, my love. No one else needs to see me this way."
Madness took the summoning chamber in Safrona's reaching - her focused channeling did not manifest one floating ocular orb, but many manifestations of void-based eyestalks drowning the chamber in abyssal energy. If allowed to permeate, greater forces of the Dark would breach through. Understanding the threat, Wraafenn was quick to tear into the nearest eye to its mistress, but it was the First's blades that cut through several eye stalks in quick succession. When the whirling noise of the chamber was set to a silence, the abyssal veil enveloping the warlock dissipated, and she took in a gasp of clean air. She felt the wary edge in the First of the Perished, the doubt punctuated by a flick of one of his blades, ready to sever her from the world. "I am me. I am here." Safrona promised, able to track the vague flicker of his silhouette separating from the rest of the darkness - another small sign of progress. "I can do this. I just. I need a moment." A breathless chuckle. "Or a strong whiskey."
The answer had been at her heels over so many years, she came to understand in an epiphany. And he was here now, nudging at her feet, a tentacled limb pricking her leg for attention. Lowering herself slowly, she let her fingertips guide her in a visual of what her eyes had lost: the length of chintinous scale leading to rough, wiry hair crowning the Felhound's eyeless head. Wraafenn flinched, uncertain of the peculiar touch from its mistress. The demon dog in all its years was unaccustomed to her physicality, only knowing her by voice, by scent, by the dark ties of binding and unnatural hunger. Her fingers gripped one of it's spearing, bone-like horns to steady the demon, she confided words in the base Demonic it understood most.
"I have no sight, like you now." Her fingers traveled downward with uncharacteristic tenderness to cradle its maw. "Show me how to be."
A guttural sound of acceptance trilled from the many-toothed maw, though like any canine it was not fully aware of what it's owner meant, only desiring in that moment to serve. Her finger tips pulsed violently at its snout, and with a sudden whimper the Felhound expired, giving up its momentous energy to the warlock.
A brief sacrifice, the felhunter would reform in the Nether and be called again to her soon. Perhaps with the reward of a large soul shard of a very special hunt.
Elernia was often the demonic sacrifice, most times out of a flare of anger, or spite. But the intentional sacrifice of the Felhound did not go to waste. Where some might have found the felhunter and its kin to be monstrous, understanding the evolution of its function had been a compelling key to manifestation. However basic a creature, Wraafenn was a hunter of extraordinary sense, attuned to soul and the aura of energy. The manifestation of the Eye opened wide for her now when she learned to disconnect from her own inferior senses, and give herself over to the extension. This was the lesson she needed…and with it came void singularity.
Normal sight returned to Safrona after a day of much needed sleep. The Eye of the Great Dark was still not often a spell Safrona relied on in her day-to-day, but it was an evolution she held pride for, all the same. It was a long trial she divulged to none; it was enough that her Soulsinger had been present through the most harrowing of it.
Exchanges with other Warlocks for knowledge was of course its own temptation, but for those newer to the Path, the Harvester would only smile enigmatically and offer: "Preparation is everything."
{ Thank you anon for this wild wind of inspiration. Brief reference to @thefirstperished, who helped to contribute to some of the writing. <3
Thank you for reading this, if you do. This was an exhaustive effort from me. }
