Searing 62, 122
The East End of Zaichaer had seen better days. It had seen worse days, too, but statistically it had mostly seen better days.
From above, it was instantly obvious to Imogen Ward that Zaichaer had suffered two impacts. First, there was a crater at the far east end of the city, just below the Knob. Her vision wasn’t quite improved enough to make out fine details from here, but an albatross’ eyes were enough to scan the ruined facades of warehouses and the cheap housing at Smokestack. The buildings around that area were scarred by Dread Mists and stranger forces, but the impact must not have been that terrible- after all, she could still see the Hobbled Gobbler from here, though she imagined nobody was drinking inside any longer.
The second blast, it seemed, had utterly obliterated the Presidium, and shattered Zaichaer’s mechanical defenses. The crater was absolutely baffling- it seemed to go down, and down, and down. All the way into the Warrens, perhaps?
Imogen had spoken to a few people on her journey north. The early rumors, apparently, had been that Kalzasi had unleashed some type of magical weapon of a scope unseen since the Sundering, or maybe even before. Others claimed that this was the doing of the Order, that their practice of New Atheism had finally so offended the gods that Zaichaer had been smote.
The business of divinities, Imogen did not claim to know. She was certain, however, that this was no work of Kalzasi. No mage had the power to crack the earth like this, to sunder a city down through one of the most advanced arrays of dragonshard negation matrices ever devised. A hundred mages couldn’t have done it. A thousand… well, maybe, but you couldn’t keep anything a thousand mages did a secret for long.
More chilling was the date. This had happened at exactly the date the river had frozen, that the port of Drathera had been assaulted. Though it had been nearly a month since, dread mists still haunted the streets below her, haunting chaos which flickered with rainbow lights in the passing shadow of her wings.
Whatever had done this had unleashed unimaginable pain and chaos. No simple blast or hammer of aether, no matter how enormous- only, then what had transpired?
That was the question- the big question, some might say the only question. It wasn’t the one Imogen first pursued, though. Once she had seen the Pfenning in disrepair, she had made swift time through the air towards the East Side, and the commonplace apartments set up therein. There wasn’t much smoke from the fires which must have blazed here once, but she kept her distance from every cloud, uninterested in matching her newfound magic against the chaos wisps aloft.
Thankfully the mists were sufficiently sparse that a route to ground was not too difficult to locate. She might have forced the issue with the Nova fire, but she’d noticed several fleshy, crystal-studded monsters haunting the alleys and broken buildings near the Presidium. Doubtless she could strike a few of the monsters down, but Ecith had taught her that while most of the chaos beasts were relatively weak, the mists occasionally bestowed them with unpredictable powers.
With this in mind, Imogen landed on the second story of the building she had sought. None of the windows were broken, to her surprise- well, no matter. Albagen gently hooked the bottom of her beak underneath the windowpane of the hallway window, then strengthened the aether of her avian jaw, filling it with the incredible, devastating power of… well, a domestic cat, actually. Opening a window didn’t really take an intense feat of mystic power.
Squeeeeaaakkk
The window lifted open, and Imogen hopped in. She shook her feathers for a moment, almost bringing her beak down before she realized that there was simply no purpose to preening. She was going to need arms to actually get Carina’s door open.
The Cardinal Rune of Animus was, Imogen was learning, a mark with great utility. Speaking to lemurs and riding capybaras was one matter. The discovery of the southern albatross’ feather, and the bird’s exceptional power of flight, an obvious key to quick travel. Even the humble domestic cat had proven useful in a few surprising ways.
Unfortunately, virtually none of these very useful bodies had the power to carry bags. Therefore she had resigned herself to traveling largely nude, filching clothing before interacting with the systems of human civilization.
Now back in Zaichaer, Imogen hoped she would be able to retrieve some of her own clothes again- but she hadn’t quite gotten to them yet. So it was that Imogen Ward was forced to revert to her right and proper form, naked as the day she was born [with one exception on her finger], in the middle of Carina’s old boardinghouse.
As she finished her reversion, Imogen concentrated again, raising scales across her skin. They weren’t clothes, and didn’t offer much modesty, but they might well be the difference between life and death if one of the monsters caught her rooting around in the dust.
Thus armored, Imogen tried the door of Carina’s apartment. As she’d expected, it was locked.
”Well.” Imogen spoke aloud in the empty hall, ”Sorry.”
She didn’t have a key to this door, but she did have a key to every door. Silver light blossomed in the empty space next to her, lengthening into an enormous sword, a plain, deadly weapon floating in the air. Imogen took the sword’s hilt in one hand, the other grasping one of the loops, and aimed directly for the junction of wall and knob.
With one thrust, Imogen’s sword punched through the wall, a hollow *clang* ringing out through the empty house. Bracing herself against the embedded sword, Imogen kicked the door, snapping it off the knob and lock and causing it to swing violently into the wall of the apartment beyond.
Carina’s apartment lay beyond, not at all dissimilar to the last time Imogen had been there… if a bit cleaner, actually. Imogen took a step forward, nearly stumbling as her bare foot came down on a pile of papers. Folded-up papers? This looked like…
”Mail?”
Imogen picked up one of the papers and opened it up, reading her friend’s mail with absolutely no shame.
This wasn’t just any letter, it was her letter! Completely unopened.
Shocked, Imogen pulled up another letter, digging through the small pile.
A tear welled up in Imogen’s eye. Weeks’ worth of letters from her lay here, unopened, unread. Some of these represented extraordinary lengths to get through the courier’s system, which was organized to avoid sending cross-continent mail to the greatest extent possible.
What did it mean? Had she done something? Had she really meant so little to her friend that she couldn’t even be bothered to open her letters?
She searched her memories. It might have been that night in that Kalzasian pub, with Aurin. She’d gotten so drunk, said so many stupid things… perhaps Carina finally thought that her association with Imogen had become more of an embarrassment than an asset?
Or the case of Mr. Wardell. Imogen had been trying to contact the families of the Necropolis last Glade, but between her preparations to go to Ecith and the sudden regime change, she simply hadn’t made any headway. Could it be that Carina had seen, then, that she was nothing but a bumbler and a bungler?
No, it might have been all the way back in the Warrens, when they’d first burst into that strange Grymalkan shrine. When she’d knocked it over, released the damned ghost which had haunted her to this very day. Clumsy, brutish, oafish, heedless… yes, Carina had seen it then.
The tears were welling up in earnest now. Imogen wiped her face with one of Carina’s other unopened letters, then glanced at the smudged contents.
The rest of the letter was rendered unreadable from Imogen’s wet, goopy face. It took only a moment of staring at the legible section, however, for a sudden relief to blossom.
Carina hadn’t received any of these!
Well, obviously. Obviously! Nobody left a pile of mail behind the mail slot of their door to show their personal disdain for someone. No, this was a pile of mail delivered and never read because Carina hadn’t been here in the first place.
Imogen rose to her feet, still a bit shaky from the tears, and dismissed her Pact sword, which she’d just noticed had been quietly about to set fire to Carina’s hatstand. After wincing through the shock of dematerialization, she set about the apartment with a fine-toothed comb, searching for clues about Carina’s whereabouts.
The fact that she hadn’t been in Zaichaer was good, but also bad. It meant she hadn’t been one of the many people killed in the mysterious blasts that tore the city apart, but… frankly, Imogen hadn’t believed that would kill Carina. She had no reason to have been caught by the initial explosions, and her friend was too skilled and canny a witch to have been corrupted by the mists thereafter. No, Imogen was glad that Carina wasn’t dead, but the fact that she wasn’t here presented new challenges.
As Imogen came across a map of train routes, however, memory struck. Before she left for Ecith, Carina had mentioned proposing to the Railrunners that they try to intercept a shipment of firearms, to aid Coven witches caught up in fighting. A shipment… by train? Probably by train. And there, she had made a mark on the map of the tracks.
A line running between the northern cities… and the Gelarian Imperium.
”...aw, damn it all.”
Imogen knew, then, with a sinking feeling, that this was exactly where Carina had gone. And that meant she could be anywhere in an area spanning a quarter of the fucking continent.
This was not good. Imogen had spent weeks finding one shop in a single city (though Drathera was so huge and separated that the description seemed unfair). There was absolutely no way she was going to be able to do the same in an entire country.
Well, if she needed more information, she needed to find the Railrunners with whom Carina consorted. Imogen looked out the window of Carina’s apartment, peering westward, across the river.
”Time to get to work.”
The East End of Zaichaer had seen better days. It had seen worse days, too, but statistically it had mostly seen better days.
From above, it was instantly obvious to Imogen Ward that Zaichaer had suffered two impacts. First, there was a crater at the far east end of the city, just below the Knob. Her vision wasn’t quite improved enough to make out fine details from here, but an albatross’ eyes were enough to scan the ruined facades of warehouses and the cheap housing at Smokestack. The buildings around that area were scarred by Dread Mists and stranger forces, but the impact must not have been that terrible- after all, she could still see the Hobbled Gobbler from here, though she imagined nobody was drinking inside any longer.
The second blast, it seemed, had utterly obliterated the Presidium, and shattered Zaichaer’s mechanical defenses. The crater was absolutely baffling- it seemed to go down, and down, and down. All the way into the Warrens, perhaps?
Imogen had spoken to a few people on her journey north. The early rumors, apparently, had been that Kalzasi had unleashed some type of magical weapon of a scope unseen since the Sundering, or maybe even before. Others claimed that this was the doing of the Order, that their practice of New Atheism had finally so offended the gods that Zaichaer had been smote.
The business of divinities, Imogen did not claim to know. She was certain, however, that this was no work of Kalzasi. No mage had the power to crack the earth like this, to sunder a city down through one of the most advanced arrays of dragonshard negation matrices ever devised. A hundred mages couldn’t have done it. A thousand… well, maybe, but you couldn’t keep anything a thousand mages did a secret for long.
More chilling was the date. This had happened at exactly the date the river had frozen, that the port of Drathera had been assaulted. Though it had been nearly a month since, dread mists still haunted the streets below her, haunting chaos which flickered with rainbow lights in the passing shadow of her wings.
Whatever had done this had unleashed unimaginable pain and chaos. No simple blast or hammer of aether, no matter how enormous- only, then what had transpired?
That was the question- the big question, some might say the only question. It wasn’t the one Imogen first pursued, though. Once she had seen the Pfenning in disrepair, she had made swift time through the air towards the East Side, and the commonplace apartments set up therein. There wasn’t much smoke from the fires which must have blazed here once, but she kept her distance from every cloud, uninterested in matching her newfound magic against the chaos wisps aloft.
Thankfully the mists were sufficiently sparse that a route to ground was not too difficult to locate. She might have forced the issue with the Nova fire, but she’d noticed several fleshy, crystal-studded monsters haunting the alleys and broken buildings near the Presidium. Doubtless she could strike a few of the monsters down, but Ecith had taught her that while most of the chaos beasts were relatively weak, the mists occasionally bestowed them with unpredictable powers.
With this in mind, Imogen landed on the second story of the building she had sought. None of the windows were broken, to her surprise- well, no matter. Albagen gently hooked the bottom of her beak underneath the windowpane of the hallway window, then strengthened the aether of her avian jaw, filling it with the incredible, devastating power of… well, a domestic cat, actually. Opening a window didn’t really take an intense feat of mystic power.
Squeeeeaaakkk
The window lifted open, and Imogen hopped in. She shook her feathers for a moment, almost bringing her beak down before she realized that there was simply no purpose to preening. She was going to need arms to actually get Carina’s door open.
~~~
The Cardinal Rune of Animus was, Imogen was learning, a mark with great utility. Speaking to lemurs and riding capybaras was one matter. The discovery of the southern albatross’ feather, and the bird’s exceptional power of flight, an obvious key to quick travel. Even the humble domestic cat had proven useful in a few surprising ways.
Unfortunately, virtually none of these very useful bodies had the power to carry bags. Therefore she had resigned herself to traveling largely nude, filching clothing before interacting with the systems of human civilization.
Now back in Zaichaer, Imogen hoped she would be able to retrieve some of her own clothes again- but she hadn’t quite gotten to them yet. So it was that Imogen Ward was forced to revert to her right and proper form, naked as the day she was born [with one exception on her finger], in the middle of Carina’s old boardinghouse.
~~~
As she finished her reversion, Imogen concentrated again, raising scales across her skin. They weren’t clothes, and didn’t offer much modesty, but they might well be the difference between life and death if one of the monsters caught her rooting around in the dust.
Thus armored, Imogen tried the door of Carina’s apartment. As she’d expected, it was locked.
”Well.” Imogen spoke aloud in the empty hall, ”Sorry.”
She didn’t have a key to this door, but she did have a key to every door. Silver light blossomed in the empty space next to her, lengthening into an enormous sword, a plain, deadly weapon floating in the air. Imogen took the sword’s hilt in one hand, the other grasping one of the loops, and aimed directly for the junction of wall and knob.
With one thrust, Imogen’s sword punched through the wall, a hollow *clang* ringing out through the empty house. Bracing herself against the embedded sword, Imogen kicked the door, snapping it off the knob and lock and causing it to swing violently into the wall of the apartment beyond.
Carina’s apartment lay beyond, not at all dissimilar to the last time Imogen had been there… if a bit cleaner, actually. Imogen took a step forward, nearly stumbling as her bare foot came down on a pile of papers. Folded-up papers? This looked like…
”Mail?”
Imogen picked up one of the papers and opened it up, reading her friend’s mail with absolutely no shame.
Searing 27, 122
Dear Carina,
Well, I have a tail now.
It is white and longer than you would have thought. After some practice, I can move it around without too much trouble, but it is not strong enough to hold anything; neither strong nor deft enough. On the plus side, it seems to instinctively move around to improve my center of gravity. I have some hope that I can use that in combat, though it will take a lot of practice before I’m confident that I will not simply cut the thing off with an errant swing.
Apparently the Animus initiation went
Dear Carina,
Well, I have a tail now.
It is white and longer than you would have thought. After some practice, I can move it around without too much trouble, but it is not strong enough to hold anything; neither strong nor deft enough. On the plus side, it seems to instinctively move around to improve my center of gravity. I have some hope that I can use that in combat, though it will take a lot of practice before I’m confident that I will not simply cut the thing off with an errant swing.
Apparently the Animus initiation went
This wasn’t just any letter, it was her letter! Completely unopened.
Shocked, Imogen pulled up another letter, digging through the small pile.
Searing 4, 122
Dear Carina,
Per my promise to regularly write, I am composing this missive. However, I am afraid that I must invoke a peculiar loophole; I do not wish to speak of what I saw in the jungle today, and I am under no obligation to write further. It is unlikely that I will wish to speak of it in the future. It is better that we do not take some things back with us.
Love,
Imogen Ward
Dear Carina,
Per my promise to regularly write, I am composing this missive. However, I am afraid that I must invoke a peculiar loophole; I do not wish to speak of what I saw in the jungle today, and I am under no obligation to write further. It is unlikely that I will wish to speak of it in the future. It is better that we do not take some things back with us.
Love,
Imogen Ward
A tear welled up in Imogen’s eye. Weeks’ worth of letters from her lay here, unopened, unread. Some of these represented extraordinary lengths to get through the courier’s system, which was organized to avoid sending cross-continent mail to the greatest extent possible.
What did it mean? Had she done something? Had she really meant so little to her friend that she couldn’t even be bothered to open her letters?
She searched her memories. It might have been that night in that Kalzasian pub, with Aurin. She’d gotten so drunk, said so many stupid things… perhaps Carina finally thought that her association with Imogen had become more of an embarrassment than an asset?
Or the case of Mr. Wardell. Imogen had been trying to contact the families of the Necropolis last Glade, but between her preparations to go to Ecith and the sudden regime change, she simply hadn’t made any headway. Could it be that Carina had seen, then, that she was nothing but a bumbler and a bungler?
No, it might have been all the way back in the Warrens, when they’d first burst into that strange Grymalkan shrine. When she’d knocked it over, released the damned ghost which had haunted her to this very day. Clumsy, brutish, oafish, heedless… yes, Carina had seen it then.
The tears were welling up in earnest now. Imogen wiped her face with one of Carina’s other unopened letters, then glanced at the smudged contents.
Searing 18, 122
Ms. Anna Carina Caron,
This office has been trying to reach you regarding your possible entitlement to an inheritance kept by the Unclaimed Property branch of Treasury. If our records are correct, they indicate that a significant sum of-
Ms. Anna Carina Caron,
This office has been trying to reach you regarding your possible entitlement to an inheritance kept by the Unclaimed Property branch of Treasury. If our records are correct, they indicate that a significant sum of-
The rest of the letter was rendered unreadable from Imogen’s wet, goopy face. It took only a moment of staring at the legible section, however, for a sudden relief to blossom.
Carina hadn’t received any of these!
Well, obviously. Obviously! Nobody left a pile of mail behind the mail slot of their door to show their personal disdain for someone. No, this was a pile of mail delivered and never read because Carina hadn’t been here in the first place.
Imogen rose to her feet, still a bit shaky from the tears, and dismissed her Pact sword, which she’d just noticed had been quietly about to set fire to Carina’s hatstand. After wincing through the shock of dematerialization, she set about the apartment with a fine-toothed comb, searching for clues about Carina’s whereabouts.
The fact that she hadn’t been in Zaichaer was good, but also bad. It meant she hadn’t been one of the many people killed in the mysterious blasts that tore the city apart, but… frankly, Imogen hadn’t believed that would kill Carina. She had no reason to have been caught by the initial explosions, and her friend was too skilled and canny a witch to have been corrupted by the mists thereafter. No, Imogen was glad that Carina wasn’t dead, but the fact that she wasn’t here presented new challenges.
As Imogen came across a map of train routes, however, memory struck. Before she left for Ecith, Carina had mentioned proposing to the Railrunners that they try to intercept a shipment of firearms, to aid Coven witches caught up in fighting. A shipment… by train? Probably by train. And there, she had made a mark on the map of the tracks.
A line running between the northern cities… and the Gelarian Imperium.
”...aw, damn it all.”
Imogen knew, then, with a sinking feeling, that this was exactly where Carina had gone. And that meant she could be anywhere in an area spanning a quarter of the fucking continent.
This was not good. Imogen had spent weeks finding one shop in a single city (though Drathera was so huge and separated that the description seemed unfair). There was absolutely no way she was going to be able to do the same in an entire country.
Well, if she needed more information, she needed to find the Railrunners with whom Carina consorted. Imogen looked out the window of Carina’s apartment, peering westward, across the river.
”Time to get to work.”