[Fern]

???

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"I found you..."

 

A brown-haired, black-eyed man man with eyebags stood before the culmination of his nigh-endless search. Inside a forest near his village, he encountered a man-sized mirror with jagged edges, shaped like a rift. Flowers were repeatedly blooming and dying in a cycle that seemed infinite.

 

Desperate, he got on all fours in order to beg the supernatural entity to hear out his plea.

 

"Please! My village has provoked the wrath of a shaman! We have been cursed with a disease that will slowly paralyze all of our bodies and kill us! If nothing is done, then the hearts of my families and friends will be stopped and they'll die!"

 

The shard made no gesture, and no sound. It simply kept hovering over the ground in front of the agonized man. Caving in to panic, the adult chose to scream out his wish to the anomaly before him.

 

"PLEASE! I wish for all the people in my village to be freed from the shaman's curse!"

 

A reflection of his pained visage appeared on the mirror. It was surrounded by abyssal darkness, showing only him and his despair, before it'd crack and shatter. Its pieces buried themselves deep into the ground as the flowers withered, a weak and brief tremor following suit.

 

"H... Huh? Did I... do it?"

 

Confused, the vaguely hopeful man started looking around for any traces of the Lazarus Shard or changes in the environment. He hesitantly rose up to a stand and became startled by screams coming from the village.

 

"What?!"

 

The man, fearful of the unknown, ran as quickly as he could towards his home. The screams of the villagers filled up the area, as they witnessed people suddenly fall onto the ground one after another. Disturbed and perplexed by the chaos brought upon his village, he rushed his way over to the most magically inclined person in the area.

 

"What's going?!"

 

"Their souls... their souls are disappearing! Leaving their bodies!"

 

"No! NO!"

 

A stray villager walked in, a woman reaching out towards the man with a horrified expression then collapsing. He turned her around and shook her in hopes that it would make her react.

 

"Stay... stay with me! Is this... is this my fault?!"

 

Right after that, the individual he sought for advice on the situation grasped at his chest and fell against a table, becoming completely silent and motionless a few moments later. The man's gaze fixated upon the rolled-up eyes of the fallen, reaching for the sides of his head as he lost all the little composure he had left.

 

"What.. what have I done?! GGHNAAAAAAAAH!"

 

Shortly afterwards, he became a victim. One of many.

 

...

 

[Meanwhile, in Chaturanga.]

 

"Oh yeah. Did you hear? Apparently all of the people in a remote village lost their souls."

 

"No way... that sounds scary. Was it a ghost or something?"

 

"Nobody knows, only that people found a bunch of corpses and that they pissed off a shaman. Maybe the shaman killed them?"

 

"Ugh... I don't want to be on that mage's bad side!"

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(OOC Note: I have been running a storyline. If you want to join and keep up with the deeper details of it, you must join my Discord event server: https://discord.gg/RRf3ZqpqYh)