Searing 33, 122
Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv is a name and, like so many others, it is a descriptive name. In common-speak, it approximates to “Gihah before the fire”.
This refers to several square miles of jungle surrounding a low mountain, which the inhabitants of Gihah do not dignify with a name as such. Instead, they call it Koidhouo’uv, or “Koid house”. It is not, you must understand, a natural mountain, but a sulking shell of rock heaved out of the earth as a shelter against the Glade rains by a god who was not made to suffer such an elemental incursion.
That god is the Primal beast of earth-fire, the Vonaid Koid.
The fire-forest which surrounds Koidhouo’uv is the joint result of the tremendous concentration of fire aether attracted by the presence of Vonaid Koid and the blindingly fast evolutionary processes of Ecith. Throughout the dry months, Vonaid Koid’s herd leaves the fire-mountain and grazes throughout the primal’s territory, superheated hooves and blazing manes starting fires as they go.
In response, the plant life adapted to regular flash-fires, producing chemicals which would increase the heat and reduce its longevity, keeping the trees safe inside their thick shells. Similarly, various vines and fungi had begun to flourish which could eject clouds of accelerant when disturbed, cooking animals which wandered into the forest and providing them with ideal fertilizers.
Although the fire-forest grew slowly over the centuries, the primal’s fires met an equal and opposite force in the rivers and streams flowing through the land. Before the village of Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv was founded, the entire lower jungle had been a swamp, territory of a primal which took the form of a vast water monitor. The chieftain of the Gihah retained a portion of that monitor’s water aether, which suffused the water throughout the fire forest, making it anathema to the upstart Vonaid Koid… for the time being.
In truth, Vonaid Koid had spent centuries recovering from some terrible battle with another, mightier primal, which had driven it to ground here. It was the generational fear of the Gihah that, one day, it would grow strong enough to shatter the water and rains which shackled it, and it would cause widespread destruction.
For now, however, one could travel safely in Vonaid Koid’s domain by keeping to the river, and so Imogen Ward did- but not by boat. Instead, Imogen traveled for three days and nights on the back of Chief Coid Ong Oping’s familiar, a spectacularly large capybara.
”Do you suppose” said Imogen, to her mount ”I should tell Carina about this? Would she believe me?”
The capybara swimming sedately beneath her snorted. Ovonain was a surprisingly intelligent animal, capable of taking many commands in Ecitherese, but the Orkhan girl was currently unable to converse in that tongue. At present, her vocal chords were too compact, and her mouth was not quite designed to make speech that complex.
It had taken Imogen only a few days after recovery to successfully manage the full-body transformation to the shape of a golden-crowned sifaka, though the process was slow, exhausting, and being so tiny was deeply disconcerting. It was also, she imagined, pretty disgusting to observe, or so she gathered from the look of disbelief on Chief Oping’s face when she demonstrated the transformation.
Still, although Ovonain was large, no Ork was going to be able to ride it, so she had resigned herself to spending a week in the form of a lemur. It was important to be able to get away from the shore quickly if a fire started, so she was forced to sleep in monkey-form; in any event, she had no way to carry clothing or other such things. The fur coat was nice, but she still felt a bit, well, naked.
”I guess this is just how those lemurs always feel,” Imogen mused, ”And most of them don’t have any flaming swords at all.”
That made her feel a bit better.
The trip through the fire-forest was, to Imogen’s surprise, quite uneventful. There were few large predators around; jaguars and raptors were big and intrusive, and liable to trigger the wrong tree or mushroom. A lemur and a capybara snoozing at the bend of a stream were simply not what anything in the area was adapted to hunt, and so nothing tried to eat either of them. Ovonain did need to wake her up one early morning to escape a sudden blaze, but it was altogether easier than her trip through the jungles had been as an Orkhan.
The final approach, however, had to be made on foot; Vonaid Koid would not permit water within a mile of its resting place, and so the rivers turned painfully around the great igneous mound it had drawn out of the earth. Thankfully, while Lemurgen’s legs were much smaller than her Orkhan legs, they were adapted to hop rapidly across the ground
The igneous mound wasn’t… ideal territory, for a lemur. The stones were razor-sharp and crumbly, and Lemurgen’s hands, evolved to grasp at the crevices in bark and take firm hold of boughs and branches, were not tough enough to confidently grab the thin black edges of the rocks.
Thankfully, Imogen had thought of this very contingency and devised a- well, not a plan per se, but one couldn’t be both beggar and chooser in this situation. As Ovonain left her off on the final shore, she allowed her spear to manifest, materializing the enormous golden weapon in a searing rift of sunfire.
She couldn’t ride the floating weapon or any such thing, but it was no great effort to manipulate the spear mentally, causing it to lay against the first low cropping of razor-sharp rocks. With an effort of will, she reshaped the smooth pole, making it easier for her lemur hands as she raced up the top and then flung it onto the next cliff to be surmounted.
With this crude magic ladder, Imogen scampered up from the obsidian shore surrounding Koidhouo’uv and began to ascend the mount itself at a good pace. The lemurs had been surprisingly helpful in their description of the resting-place of her prize, and it took her only a few minutes of scampering up and down the gleaming black walls to find the entry to the cave they advised her to use.
She paused on the precipice. This wasn’t some elaborate trick, to direct her into the Primal’s lair and get her killed as revenge for Halftail’s injury, was it? No, that wasn’t quite how the lemurs thought.
”Anyway,” Imogen reasoned, ”If I encounter this ‘primal’, I’ll just chase it off. No big deal.”
Imogen descended through the twisting passage of the lemur tunnel, allowing her spear to aid her descent by digging into the walls at odd junctures, so that she could leap to or hang off as she went. She was not, herself, much of an acrobat, but the lemur form was made for nothing but such travel, and it took very little time to make good headway into the tunnel.
The air grew hotter and hotter as she descended- presumably the influence of the Vonaid Koid. It occurred to the Sunsinger girl that she wasn’t really certain what powers the primals of Ecith were meant to possess; she’d never heard that they were especially perspicacious, but she decided to dismiss her spear before she ran into it anyway. While Imogen had only a basic understanding of the art of Semblance, she doubted any enormous animal was going to notice the aetheric expenditure from Animus alone.
After traveling down a few more ledges, Imogen crawled down another tunnel and entered unexpectedly into a vast cavern–she thought it might be a thousand yards or more to the wall on the other side–which was hot as an oven. Her perch was high up near ventilation, and so felt nothing more than an acute discomfort, but she cavern shimmered with heat in the low light afforded by the thick pools of magma far below her.
The cavern was dominated by a vast black stone, smooth as though it were worked, which rose from the center of the cave and bent in on itself. Imogen could only imagine it the work of magic, for she had never been a student of the darker art of geology.
It took the lemur a moment of peering about to locate the statuette; below her and a few hundred yards off to the right, a natural stone formation formed a rough table, which was cluttered with various clearly-artificial treasures. Coins, carved stones, a handful of pots; evidently, these were the things the lemurs had, for whatever reason, thought would please the Vonaid Koid.
Thankfully, she couldn’t spot the monster itself; not that she expected it would matter. At her current size, far away from the floor of the cavern, she doubted a primal could even notice her. The lemurs wouldn’t come in and leave things on that table if they were regularly wiped out in the process, so she imagined that-
A piercing noise split the cavern, one she had seldom heard, but enough to fill her tiny primate heart with dread. She turned.
A hundred yards away, high above the cavern floor, a pale, thin, translucent figure hovered. It was hard to make out details from this distance, but she didn’t need eyes to recognize the spirit which had haunted her ever since that fateful day in the Warrens a year ago.
The form of the armored hytori (she thought) shimmered and flickered in the air between her and the huge rock formation in the center of the cavern.. It was too far away for her to reach it with her spear, and she didn’t know anything other than the Nova-flame which could harm a ghost. It stared at her, silent for a moment, then shook its strange, distorted head, and opened its mouth again.
The spirit wailed again, then slowly faded back to wherever ghosts live when they’re not harassing Imogen Ward. The lemur stared into the cavern for a few more seconds, breathing heavily, then began to slowly sidle towards the stone offering-table anew.
And then the huge stone in the center of the room opened an eye.
Vonaid Koid is shaped like a gazelle, or perhaps an antelope, or perhaps a pronghorn. Its skin is stone, and its blood is molten. It stands two hundred feet at its shoulder, and higher at the horn. None of these things mattered to Imogen Ward.
Imogen Ward did not possess the Cardinal Rune of Semblance. She did not even possess a particularly developed sense of mortal awareness, and famously once confused an Avialae man for Siltori. Nevertheless, when Vonaid Koid opened its great red eye, larger than her entire body (even before she became a lemur), she sensed many things. At the periphery of an inferno of aether so profound, even the thickest Orkhan alive could feel nothing but the bright, terrible waves of light and wrath which it emitted with every breath.
Vonaid Koid was old, of course; perhaps it had walked these lands before Malgar ever slew the Greatwrym which gave rise to her race. Before a creature so vast and ancient, time felt like a breeze upon a mountain.
Vonaid Koid was powerful; it was not merely a large beast. The creature’s aether was packed so densely that the moment it awoke, the air in the cavern became suffocating. Imogen felt her fur stiffen as the Primal’s regard alone boiled the ambient water out of the air, and her breathing grew harsh and ragged in an instant. In the space of an instant, she understood her misconception; she had thought of a Primal as a great living lump of elemental aether, but this was a breathing conduit to a force whose expression could render her flesh to ash and her ash to smoke in the space of a second. It was not like a living dragonshard. It was a raw, illimitable force. And…
Vonaid Koid was angry.
“Anger” wasn’t a sufficient word for it. The Primal was not meant to be here. It did not belong inside the obsidian tomb it had raised as a shield, pelted for months with rain and surrounded by disobedient waters. It was made to run the high plains of the plateaus, to race for hours under the sun, above the stormclouds. Instead, it endured here, wounded and weary and anguished for entire mortal generations.
Vonaid Koid had drunk of Malgar’s wine until it was full to bursting, but the capricious fates held its mouth open for more. If Vonaid Koid could have shattered all of Ecith and died in a single blaze of furious release, it would have done so gladly.
As it woke from its slumber, Vonaid Koid blinked, casting blearily about. It could not see the source of the sound which woke it, but… there! In the high corner of its prison, Vonaid Koid spotted a tiny fire. Barely a spark, as far as the titan of flames and earth was concerned, but a fire nonetheless.
And it was no spark the likes of which the Primal had seen. The little argent spark, so dim and enchanting, sang quietly through the miasma of the cave, promising that it could revitalize the Primal, could burn away the cruel wound which its ancient enemy had left, could cut through the net of watery aether which the shamans of the Gihah had spun around its isle for a century.
Slowly, fascinated by the tiny song of the spark, Vonaid Koid began to stand.
When Imogen Ward came to her senses, she found herself barrelling through the tunnels of Koidhouo’uv, moving with all of the instinctive, desperate speed her lemur body would afford her.
There was a heat–a tremendous, blistering heat–at her back, but she refused to slow long enough to glance backwards. As she regained control of herself, she threw every thought into the forward impulse, running as fast as she possibly could. The heat grew more intense with every second, and she wondered for a moment if her tail had already been incinerated, gone only days after she first grew it.
Then, just as she felt that the fire must be about to claim her, Imogen burst into the open air, grasping, coughing. She tumbled senselessly down the rocks, picking up a few nasty scratches on her back before she remembered her other magic and summoned her shield to catch herself. Fire roared out of the cavern behind her, flaring dramatically into the night.
She tried to stop and catch her breath, but lemurs work a little differently than Orks, and the momentary confusion was enough to make her burst into a coughing fit.
There was a low rumble throughout the ground, and Imogen took a moment to realize that something was moving within the cave, so loudly that even the igneous rocks could not entirely muffle the noise. Holy terror gripped her again, and she took off down the mount, racing for the shore, hardly even noticing her shield dematerialize.
She lept as quickly as her legs could take her, and within a minute she was close enough to the shore to see Ovonain’s plump form, the big capybara rolling peacefully in the water as though he couldn’t hear the sounds of shifting, tectonic fury behind her. Maybe he couldn’t.
Without time for niceties, Lemurgen Ward leapt directly onto the capybara’s back. It didn’t seem to startle Ovonain at all, though he looked back at her reproachfully. As he set off into the stream, paddling back towards the Gihah, she felt the power of Chief Coid Ong Oping’s Elemental magic surround her, wearing away the gaze of the great fire Primal until she could hardly feel it.
She felt a great relief as the capybara carried her away from Koidhouo’uv, and an even greater relief as she felt the Chief’s aether surround her, shrouding her from the great, fiery eye. Nonetheless, it would be a full day before she felt like herself enough to speak again, and she made no further puns or jokes on her trip back to the Gihah.
…did not engage the Primal. Upon initial consideration, I gauged my chances of defeating the Primal as negligible. On further consideration, I stand by this assessment.
Given the Primal’s supernatural power to detect me and the unexplained ghost’s interference, I further determined that a later return for stealth repossession was not feasible. I assess that retrieval of the specified object will not be possible without first killing the Vonaid Koid.
Because I have no way to accomplish this, I am forced to abort this mission. I do not recommend that any follow-up team be sent at this time.
Imogen Ward, Corporal.
Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv is a name and, like so many others, it is a descriptive name. In common-speak, it approximates to “Gihah before the fire”.
This refers to several square miles of jungle surrounding a low mountain, which the inhabitants of Gihah do not dignify with a name as such. Instead, they call it Koidhouo’uv, or “Koid house”. It is not, you must understand, a natural mountain, but a sulking shell of rock heaved out of the earth as a shelter against the Glade rains by a god who was not made to suffer such an elemental incursion.
That god is the Primal beast of earth-fire, the Vonaid Koid.
~~~
Date TBD, 122
To: Central File
Mission Summary
After-action Report
Author: Sunsinger Corporal Imogen Ward, special attache to the Pfenning Theater
Result: Failure
Narrative: On Glade 13, 122, I received instructions to prepare for travel to Ecith, to obtain a specified item from an identified contact.
On Glade 60, 122, I embarked by airship to Sangen, and thereby traveled by ocean liner to Ecith.
On Glade 71, 122, I arrived in the capital city of Drathera, where I discovered that I could no longer recall the contact’s name and information. After consultation with the Librarians, a group of dragons living within the city, I conducted a search.
On Glade 85, 122, I located the contact’s place of business and discovered that he had been “taken” by the Unknown, and that his property had been auctioned off, with the specified item removed to a village called Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv.
On Searing 1, 122, I entered the jungle to locate Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv. Over the next several days, I encountered a wide range of hostile fauna, which I dispatched.
On Searing 05, 122, I encountered a military contingent from Drathera, who assisted me in locating the village.
On Searing 08, 122, I reached Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv. Therein I discovered that the villagers had offered the specified item as devotion to the Triumvirate. I also discovered that such devotions were taken by a family of lemurs.
On Searing 19, 122, I underwent initiation into Animus in order to negotiate with the lemurs.
On Searing 27, 122, I successfully exchanged the location of the specified item for construction of a three-room tree house. The lemurs confirmed to me that as the specified item was a “stone pretty”, it was their custom to take it to a nearby mountain to trade for “glow stone”, which they later exchange to yet another, unknown, third party.
On Searing 33, 122, I entered Koidhouo’uv.
To: Central File
Mission Summary
After-action Report
Author: Sunsinger Corporal Imogen Ward, special attache to the Pfenning Theater
Result: Failure
Narrative: On Glade 13, 122, I received instructions to prepare for travel to Ecith, to obtain a specified item from an identified contact.
On Glade 60, 122, I embarked by airship to Sangen, and thereby traveled by ocean liner to Ecith.
On Glade 71, 122, I arrived in the capital city of Drathera, where I discovered that I could no longer recall the contact’s name and information. After consultation with the Librarians, a group of dragons living within the city, I conducted a search.
On Glade 85, 122, I located the contact’s place of business and discovered that he had been “taken” by the Unknown, and that his property had been auctioned off, with the specified item removed to a village called Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv.
On Searing 1, 122, I entered the jungle to locate Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv. Over the next several days, I encountered a wide range of hostile fauna, which I dispatched.
On Searing 05, 122, I encountered a military contingent from Drathera, who assisted me in locating the village.
On Searing 08, 122, I reached Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv. Therein I discovered that the villagers had offered the specified item as devotion to the Triumvirate. I also discovered that such devotions were taken by a family of lemurs.
On Searing 19, 122, I underwent initiation into Animus in order to negotiate with the lemurs.
On Searing 27, 122, I successfully exchanged the location of the specified item for construction of a three-room tree house. The lemurs confirmed to me that as the specified item was a “stone pretty”, it was their custom to take it to a nearby mountain to trade for “glow stone”, which they later exchange to yet another, unknown, third party.
On Searing 33, 122, I entered Koidhouo’uv.
~~~
The fire-forest which surrounds Koidhouo’uv is the joint result of the tremendous concentration of fire aether attracted by the presence of Vonaid Koid and the blindingly fast evolutionary processes of Ecith. Throughout the dry months, Vonaid Koid’s herd leaves the fire-mountain and grazes throughout the primal’s territory, superheated hooves and blazing manes starting fires as they go.
In response, the plant life adapted to regular flash-fires, producing chemicals which would increase the heat and reduce its longevity, keeping the trees safe inside their thick shells. Similarly, various vines and fungi had begun to flourish which could eject clouds of accelerant when disturbed, cooking animals which wandered into the forest and providing them with ideal fertilizers.
Although the fire-forest grew slowly over the centuries, the primal’s fires met an equal and opposite force in the rivers and streams flowing through the land. Before the village of Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv was founded, the entire lower jungle had been a swamp, territory of a primal which took the form of a vast water monitor. The chieftain of the Gihah retained a portion of that monitor’s water aether, which suffused the water throughout the fire forest, making it anathema to the upstart Vonaid Koid… for the time being.
In truth, Vonaid Koid had spent centuries recovering from some terrible battle with another, mightier primal, which had driven it to ground here. It was the generational fear of the Gihah that, one day, it would grow strong enough to shatter the water and rains which shackled it, and it would cause widespread destruction.
For now, however, one could travel safely in Vonaid Koid’s domain by keeping to the river, and so Imogen Ward did- but not by boat. Instead, Imogen traveled for three days and nights on the back of Chief Coid Ong Oping’s familiar, a spectacularly large capybara.
~~~
”Do you suppose” said Imogen, to her mount ”I should tell Carina about this? Would she believe me?”
The capybara swimming sedately beneath her snorted. Ovonain was a surprisingly intelligent animal, capable of taking many commands in Ecitherese, but the Orkhan girl was currently unable to converse in that tongue. At present, her vocal chords were too compact, and her mouth was not quite designed to make speech that complex.
It had taken Imogen only a few days after recovery to successfully manage the full-body transformation to the shape of a golden-crowned sifaka, though the process was slow, exhausting, and being so tiny was deeply disconcerting. It was also, she imagined, pretty disgusting to observe, or so she gathered from the look of disbelief on Chief Oping’s face when she demonstrated the transformation.
Still, although Ovonain was large, no Ork was going to be able to ride it, so she had resigned herself to spending a week in the form of a lemur. It was important to be able to get away from the shore quickly if a fire started, so she was forced to sleep in monkey-form; in any event, she had no way to carry clothing or other such things. The fur coat was nice, but she still felt a bit, well, naked.
”I guess this is just how those lemurs always feel,” Imogen mused, ”And most of them don’t have any flaming swords at all.”
That made her feel a bit better.
~~~
The trip through the fire-forest was, to Imogen’s surprise, quite uneventful. There were few large predators around; jaguars and raptors were big and intrusive, and liable to trigger the wrong tree or mushroom. A lemur and a capybara snoozing at the bend of a stream were simply not what anything in the area was adapted to hunt, and so nothing tried to eat either of them. Ovonain did need to wake her up one early morning to escape a sudden blaze, but it was altogether easier than her trip through the jungles had been as an Orkhan.
The final approach, however, had to be made on foot; Vonaid Koid would not permit water within a mile of its resting place, and so the rivers turned painfully around the great igneous mound it had drawn out of the earth. Thankfully, while Lemurgen’s legs were much smaller than her Orkhan legs, they were adapted to hop rapidly across the ground
The igneous mound wasn’t… ideal territory, for a lemur. The stones were razor-sharp and crumbly, and Lemurgen’s hands, evolved to grasp at the crevices in bark and take firm hold of boughs and branches, were not tough enough to confidently grab the thin black edges of the rocks.
Thankfully, Imogen had thought of this very contingency and devised a- well, not a plan per se, but one couldn’t be both beggar and chooser in this situation. As Ovonain left her off on the final shore, she allowed her spear to manifest, materializing the enormous golden weapon in a searing rift of sunfire.
She couldn’t ride the floating weapon or any such thing, but it was no great effort to manipulate the spear mentally, causing it to lay against the first low cropping of razor-sharp rocks. With an effort of will, she reshaped the smooth pole, making it easier for her lemur hands as she raced up the top and then flung it onto the next cliff to be surmounted.
With this crude magic ladder, Imogen scampered up from the obsidian shore surrounding Koidhouo’uv and began to ascend the mount itself at a good pace. The lemurs had been surprisingly helpful in their description of the resting-place of her prize, and it took her only a few minutes of scampering up and down the gleaming black walls to find the entry to the cave they advised her to use.
She paused on the precipice. This wasn’t some elaborate trick, to direct her into the Primal’s lair and get her killed as revenge for Halftail’s injury, was it? No, that wasn’t quite how the lemurs thought.
”Anyway,” Imogen reasoned, ”If I encounter this ‘primal’, I’ll just chase it off. No big deal.”
~~~
Imogen descended through the twisting passage of the lemur tunnel, allowing her spear to aid her descent by digging into the walls at odd junctures, so that she could leap to or hang off as she went. She was not, herself, much of an acrobat, but the lemur form was made for nothing but such travel, and it took very little time to make good headway into the tunnel.
The air grew hotter and hotter as she descended- presumably the influence of the Vonaid Koid. It occurred to the Sunsinger girl that she wasn’t really certain what powers the primals of Ecith were meant to possess; she’d never heard that they were especially perspicacious, but she decided to dismiss her spear before she ran into it anyway. While Imogen had only a basic understanding of the art of Semblance, she doubted any enormous animal was going to notice the aetheric expenditure from Animus alone.
After traveling down a few more ledges, Imogen crawled down another tunnel and entered unexpectedly into a vast cavern–she thought it might be a thousand yards or more to the wall on the other side–which was hot as an oven. Her perch was high up near ventilation, and so felt nothing more than an acute discomfort, but she cavern shimmered with heat in the low light afforded by the thick pools of magma far below her.
The cavern was dominated by a vast black stone, smooth as though it were worked, which rose from the center of the cave and bent in on itself. Imogen could only imagine it the work of magic, for she had never been a student of the darker art of geology.
It took the lemur a moment of peering about to locate the statuette; below her and a few hundred yards off to the right, a natural stone formation formed a rough table, which was cluttered with various clearly-artificial treasures. Coins, carved stones, a handful of pots; evidently, these were the things the lemurs had, for whatever reason, thought would please the Vonaid Koid.
Thankfully, she couldn’t spot the monster itself; not that she expected it would matter. At her current size, far away from the floor of the cavern, she doubted a primal could even notice her. The lemurs wouldn’t come in and leave things on that table if they were regularly wiped out in the process, so she imagined that-
~~~
O O O O O O O O O O O
A piercing noise split the cavern, one she had seldom heard, but enough to fill her tiny primate heart with dread. She turned.
A hundred yards away, high above the cavern floor, a pale, thin, translucent figure hovered. It was hard to make out details from this distance, but she didn’t need eyes to recognize the spirit which had haunted her ever since that fateful day in the Warrens a year ago.
The form of the armored hytori (she thought) shimmered and flickered in the air between her and the huge rock formation in the center of the cavern.. It was too far away for her to reach it with her spear, and she didn’t know anything other than the Nova-flame which could harm a ghost. It stared at her, silent for a moment, then shook its strange, distorted head, and opened its mouth again.
O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O
The spirit wailed again, then slowly faded back to wherever ghosts live when they’re not harassing Imogen Ward. The lemur stared into the cavern for a few more seconds, breathing heavily, then began to slowly sidle towards the stone offering-table anew.
And then the huge stone in the center of the room opened an eye.
~~~
Vonaid Koid is shaped like a gazelle, or perhaps an antelope, or perhaps a pronghorn. Its skin is stone, and its blood is molten. It stands two hundred feet at its shoulder, and higher at the horn. None of these things mattered to Imogen Ward.
Imogen Ward did not possess the Cardinal Rune of Semblance. She did not even possess a particularly developed sense of mortal awareness, and famously once confused an Avialae man for Siltori. Nevertheless, when Vonaid Koid opened its great red eye, larger than her entire body (even before she became a lemur), she sensed many things. At the periphery of an inferno of aether so profound, even the thickest Orkhan alive could feel nothing but the bright, terrible waves of light and wrath which it emitted with every breath.
Vonaid Koid was old, of course; perhaps it had walked these lands before Malgar ever slew the Greatwrym which gave rise to her race. Before a creature so vast and ancient, time felt like a breeze upon a mountain.
Vonaid Koid was powerful; it was not merely a large beast. The creature’s aether was packed so densely that the moment it awoke, the air in the cavern became suffocating. Imogen felt her fur stiffen as the Primal’s regard alone boiled the ambient water out of the air, and her breathing grew harsh and ragged in an instant. In the space of an instant, she understood her misconception; she had thought of a Primal as a great living lump of elemental aether, but this was a breathing conduit to a force whose expression could render her flesh to ash and her ash to smoke in the space of a second. It was not like a living dragonshard. It was a raw, illimitable force. And…
Vonaid Koid was angry.
~~~
“Anger” wasn’t a sufficient word for it. The Primal was not meant to be here. It did not belong inside the obsidian tomb it had raised as a shield, pelted for months with rain and surrounded by disobedient waters. It was made to run the high plains of the plateaus, to race for hours under the sun, above the stormclouds. Instead, it endured here, wounded and weary and anguished for entire mortal generations.
Vonaid Koid had drunk of Malgar’s wine until it was full to bursting, but the capricious fates held its mouth open for more. If Vonaid Koid could have shattered all of Ecith and died in a single blaze of furious release, it would have done so gladly.
As it woke from its slumber, Vonaid Koid blinked, casting blearily about. It could not see the source of the sound which woke it, but… there! In the high corner of its prison, Vonaid Koid spotted a tiny fire. Barely a spark, as far as the titan of flames and earth was concerned, but a fire nonetheless.
And it was no spark the likes of which the Primal had seen. The little argent spark, so dim and enchanting, sang quietly through the miasma of the cave, promising that it could revitalize the Primal, could burn away the cruel wound which its ancient enemy had left, could cut through the net of watery aether which the shamans of the Gihah had spun around its isle for a century.
Slowly, fascinated by the tiny song of the spark, Vonaid Koid began to stand.
~~~
When Imogen Ward came to her senses, she found herself barrelling through the tunnels of Koidhouo’uv, moving with all of the instinctive, desperate speed her lemur body would afford her.
There was a heat–a tremendous, blistering heat–at her back, but she refused to slow long enough to glance backwards. As she regained control of herself, she threw every thought into the forward impulse, running as fast as she possibly could. The heat grew more intense with every second, and she wondered for a moment if her tail had already been incinerated, gone only days after she first grew it.
Then, just as she felt that the fire must be about to claim her, Imogen burst into the open air, grasping, coughing. She tumbled senselessly down the rocks, picking up a few nasty scratches on her back before she remembered her other magic and summoned her shield to catch herself. Fire roared out of the cavern behind her, flaring dramatically into the night.
She tried to stop and catch her breath, but lemurs work a little differently than Orks, and the momentary confusion was enough to make her burst into a coughing fit.
There was a low rumble throughout the ground, and Imogen took a moment to realize that something was moving within the cave, so loudly that even the igneous rocks could not entirely muffle the noise. Holy terror gripped her again, and she took off down the mount, racing for the shore, hardly even noticing her shield dematerialize.
She lept as quickly as her legs could take her, and within a minute she was close enough to the shore to see Ovonain’s plump form, the big capybara rolling peacefully in the water as though he couldn’t hear the sounds of shifting, tectonic fury behind her. Maybe he couldn’t.
Without time for niceties, Lemurgen Ward leapt directly onto the capybara’s back. It didn’t seem to startle Ovonain at all, though he looked back at her reproachfully. As he set off into the stream, paddling back towards the Gihah, she felt the power of Chief Coid Ong Oping’s Elemental magic surround her, wearing away the gaze of the great fire Primal until she could hardly feel it.
She felt a great relief as the capybara carried her away from Koidhouo’uv, and an even greater relief as she felt the Chief’s aether surround her, shrouding her from the great, fiery eye. Nonetheless, it would be a full day before she felt like herself enough to speak again, and she made no further puns or jokes on her trip back to the Gihah.
~~~
…did not engage the Primal. Upon initial consideration, I gauged my chances of defeating the Primal as negligible. On further consideration, I stand by this assessment.
Given the Primal’s supernatural power to detect me and the unexplained ghost’s interference, I further determined that a later return for stealth repossession was not feasible. I assess that retrieval of the specified object will not be possible without first killing the Vonaid Koid.
Because I have no way to accomplish this, I am forced to abort this mission. I do not recommend that any follow-up team be sent at this time.
Imogen Ward, Corporal.