Chapter 210 - 211
Alistar woke up with a start, his head pounding with a terrible headache as he immediately fell into a fit of coughing. He was somewhere in the forests outside of Distan—he knew these woods well enough to recognize this fact—but he had no idea of the exact location. He was lying at the fringes of a small clearing, his naked body covered in dirt and soot. The ground was scorched in most places, with the trunks of the surrounding trees burning strongly in large swaths. With the amount of fire in the area, if he hadn’t been lying on the ground with his face pressed against the dirt, he’d surely have suffocated amidst the dense screen of smoke.
What...what happened?
It seemed as if somebody had attempted to put out the various fires that had popped up in the area, but evidently they had persisted to the point of swallowing up several trees. Nobody else was around, leaving him wondering how his current situation came to be. His mind groggy and his head pounding, he decided that his first course of action should be to leave the area lest he get caught up in the expanding conflagration.
It took him several minutes to crawl to a safer area, during which time he noticed a long trail of large footprints leading off into the forest with significant gaps in between them. Whoever else had been here, they must have been a very tall individual.
Still coughing from smoke inhalation, Alistar propped himself up against a tree and belatedly decided to put out the forest fire lest it spread farther and grow into a larger problem. Raising a hand and summoning large tendrils of moisture up from the soil beneath him, his stomach sunk and an alarm bell sounded in his mind as he almost immediately lost control of the spell.
My magics...why can’t I use my magics?
He closed his eyes and focused on the surrounding area, relieved to find that his magical awareness was still in its usual state. Even so, it was important to note that all of his limiters were missing along with his clothes, which meant that he should have been able to cast any of the spells in his repertoire with subconscious ease.
How did I get here?
After raking his brain for a few moments, a string of nightmarish memories suddenly flooded through his mind like cascading waters that had just broken through a failing dam.