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And it was all back-to-back, too, Hector noticed. If they were talking about a span of like two thousand years or whatever, then yeah, sure, all this stuff was bound to happen sooner or later, but the sprout was still barely up to his waist. He may not have been a botanist, but didn't that mean that all these disasters were taking place within like five years of one another or something?

The vision slowed again, this time on a raging wildfire. The forest in the distance was already consumed, lighting up the the entire horizon. The grass was alight, too, and the flames were approaching quickly.

Until they weren't.

The vision slowed too much, perhaps. Everything was reduced to a crawl. Flames mid-flicker. Smoke mid-billow. Countless glowing embers wafted in place, as if stuck in glass. There was one right in front of his face, and Hector couldn't help reaching out to try and touch it.

His fingers phased right through it. No surprise there, he supposed. Super weird and kinda awesome, but no surprise. He wasn't actually here, after all.

How trippy, he thought. The world in slow motion. A raging inferno, too.

Hmm. He didn't know what else he could do here other than admire the spectacle. Why had the vision slowed down so much? This seemed a little excessive. Was the Forge trying to show him something that was particularly fleeting?

He looked carefully, but nothing looked all that strange, really. Agrian was there. The sprout was there. And the flames all around. He couldn't even see the blond dude around, this time.

After a spell, however, he heard a new noise. The vision had sounds of if its own, but they'd all slowed down so much as to become a kind of low, background hum at this point.

This new sound did not belong. While the world remained slow, this sound was much more recognizable to his ears--in terms of speed, at least. He couldn't fully place what it was, though. Maybe like a combination of cloth ripping and glass tearing. Repeatedly.

Then a dark hole appear in front of him. Several of them, in fact. All in midair.