Chapter 559: Purgatory of Two Suns
"AAAAAARRRRGGGG!!"
While Hauke celebrated his escape from the prison of his mind, Ollie roared in anguish and frustration as he experienced the pain of burning to death in the searing flames of the Inquisition’s sorcery... again.
The world of the vision shifted around him, returning him to the very beginning as he lay in a curled-up, fetal position on a grassy hillside outside of a quiet village that overlooked rocky hills and a dense forest of cypress trees. The village in his vision wasn’t exactly identical to the one he had helped to construct in the Vale of Mists, but it was similar enough to feel hauntingly familiar, especially when he realized that it was populated by many of the same people.
"Well, Ollie," Ashlynn’s voice called while the aspiring knight and witch shook and trembled on the ground. "Do you accept your results as the best outcome you could achieve?"
"No!" Ollie spat as he struggled to rise from the ground. Each time he failed, the trial reset, but the memory of the pain and suffering lingered with him for several minutes until his mind caught up with the changes.
"No," he repeated as he regained his footing and slowly pulled himself upright before the vision of Ashlynn who had become his personal tormentor for... for more days than his pain-addled mind could recall.
Ashlynn had told him that the trial would end within nine days, one way or another, but it had become very clear that in this vision, time moved much, much faster than it did in the real world and he had already spent dozens of days struggling against the devilish scenario that the Ashlynn in his vision had devised for him.
"If I cannot save my people," he said between ragged breaths. "With all the gifts and knowledge you’ve given me. And all the powers at my fingertips. Then I don’t, I don’t deserve to be the Cypress Witch."
"Have you ever considered that this might be a test that you cannot pass?" Ashlynn asked, perching on a nearby stump and giving Ollie a careful, evaluating look. "That this might be about learning the limits of a witch’s power?"
"That, that can’t be right," Ollie said as he thought back over the loop that he’d been stuck in for what felt like months on end.
In the beginning, the vision of Ashlynn had guided him in unlocking the power of a witch, using the energy of the world to help plants to grow. He’d learned to draw the life out of weeds and provide it to vegetables that could help sustain the ever-growing village. The magic had been so immediately relevant to his struggles over the summer that he applied himself with vigor, practicing until he could easily maintain whole fields of crops, though Ashlynn was careful about teaching him that at a certain scale, there wouldn’t be enough ’weeds’ to sacrifice and he would have to make choices about taking some away from the grove of Cypress trees to sustain the crops.
She had even let him find out firsthand that some levels of abundance could only be achieved once before the sacrifice he required of the trees was too great for the mighty guardians to recover from.