Carnival of Chaos
Cristoff Whitemarch
It took a while before Cristoff’s heart had stopped thumping and he realized that the illusion had disappeared. He cringed as he realized he was standing in a pile of horse droppings, in a stable of some sort, but the reek of manure did not stop him breathing a sigh of relief.
He paused a moment to get his bearings, before stepping out of the stable. He looked around, and his heart sank as he saw the column of smoke and flashes of orange from the north of the town – where Tristan’s challenge was situated. His first instinct was to run all the way there, and try to find his brother, and hope against hope that he was, by some miracle, alive.
The feeling only lasted a moment though. Somehow, instead of a devastating anxiety or crippling grief, his mind was filled with… silence. Perhaps he had gone into shock? He vaguely remembered feeling a similar sensation on hearing of the death of his second brother, Devan. His mind seemed to not care, for the time being, about Tristan’s fate – it was sealed, after all; the illusionist would not leave such a thing to chance. No; this was the time to act. There would be plenty of time to mourn later.
With a heightened sense of awareness, he looked around at the west and east, where the others’ missions were. Hanus seemed to have cleared his with some time remaining, but he watched fearfully as the illusion in Aneura’s quarter of the town refused to disappear, even as the clock ticked down. He held his breath as the final seconds ticked away, certain their party was about to be reduced to two, before the illusions vanished at exactly the last moment. As the illusion faded away in the distance, he realized it was now safe to collaborate with the others once more, and sent up a green signal flare with his magic to let them know he was not worse for the wear in any way.
He tried to decide what to do next. He was now free to meet up with the others, without the fear that the mage would interpret it as an attempt to collaborate in clearing the challenges. He was already on his way back towards the inn, when a man peeked out from a second floor window, before drawing his head back in. Suddenly, it hit Cristoff that there must have been a good number of people in Tristan’s quarter of the town, and that not all of them were necessarily dead.
Alarmed that he had not thought of this sooner, he rushed in the direction of the smoke and flames, sending up two red signal flares in succession that flew in an arc from his current position towards the north of the town, hoping his allies understood that he was headed that way, and praying they would come with him.