Frost 22, 122
Imogen Ward was too sure of where she was, and that was the problem. Consider the senses:
The Ork woman’s skin was cold, though not painfully so; the breeze bore the distant flush of ice, but only enough to chill, not to cut through cloth and skin alike as the high winds off the northern lakes. Her eyes took in deciduous trees, mixed with evergreens such that the treeline wasn’t quite skeletal, but certainly seemed… haggard. With her nose, Imogen could detect the subtle scents of thawed moss and frozen grass, riding just above the cold. Though her ears twitched, she heard little more than the creaking of the woods and occasional birdsong.
All of that added up to the obvious and unhelpful. She was in the woods, somewhere in northern Karnor. Maybe Dalquia, or perhaps she’d passed that land already? Hard to know.
No, the problem was the sixth sense. She could sense, in the darkness beyond her mind’s eye, the contours of the space beneath space, or perhaps between it, telling her where she was in relation to everywhere else she’d ever been.
"Oh, come on!" Imogen said aloud, exasperated, "I need to know where I am; I already know where I’m not!"
The woods did not answer, wherever they were.
The Cardinal Rune she received in Gel’Grandal had been her third such initiation, and where Reaving had been the agonizing culmination of a lifetime of preparation and Animus had been like a fever dream, Traversion was like a sucker punch. The pain had been sudden and impossible to prepare for, ripping away her reason in an instant, but disappearing with the rising sun.
The confusion, however, had not faded.
She had thought she understood the principles of slipspace, having accompanied the Railrunners on their jaunts for long. This was a mistake. She had known about the principles, had read the books about the principles, had talked to the practitioners and heard their descriptions and come away with an idea about how it all works which was not so much incorrect as incomplete.
“The basic working of a Cardinal Rune,” her uncle had told her, years before she was first branded with one, “is joinder. It’s a staple between the power and your soul. If you had a third arm grafted on, connected so perfectly that it could be moved like all the others, it would still take you time to feel it as part of yourself.”
Come to think of it, that analogy was uncomfortably literal for a girl who woke up one day with a lemur’s tail (which twitched involuntarily as she pondered it). Still, with both Reaving and Animus, she’d understood the things the magic worked upon. The sword had been her life, and her body… well, okay, that was also–and literally–her life. Traversers just waved a hand and made big holes appear in the air, or disappeared.
When she had first returned to her physical body from the astral and felt, really felt how thin the veil between space and slipspace was, it had made her nauseous. She’d been violently ill as she tried to realign herself in a world where all the rocks and trees and buildings suddenly seemed like they were stood upon shifting sands.
Even now, as Imogen steadied herself against the trunk of a tree, she felt like the world was spinning. She stared at the bark, feeling that just behind it, just beyond it, there was… not nowhere, not everywhere, just elsewhere.
Spurred by impulse and restless energy, Imogen looked at the world in front of her and the gap in the woods just a few meters away, and imagined how the distance would look in the slipspace. Well, it wouldn’t “look” like anything, of course, but the buzzing in the back of her mind made the intuitive leap anyway and she felt in her bones how to move from here to there.
The Sunsinger took a step, passing through the membrane between the worlds. It was thin- perhaps infinitely thin. Steps through a cobwebbed doorway were inexpressably more substantially impeded than this one, but, unlike those webs, the barrier between worlds never broke. It simply deformed around her as she moved, her body momentarily part of the multiversal meniscus.
The distance she’d selected in the material world was very small, and the distance she passed through in Slipspace all the smaller. It is said by scientists in the modern day that an individual who was teleported to the surface of a sun for a nanosecond and back would survive, would not even notice the trip had occurred for want of time for the forces to interact. Imogen’s blink wasn’t quite so short, but it was still like a flash in her eyes, and then…
…she stood in another location entirely.
"Alright, I just need a-a-a touchstone." Imogen resolved, shaky, ”People get used to this after a while, I’ve seen it happen; I know they do."
It was obviously a matter of experience- everything was. Perhaps if she closed herself off to the strange, ever-updating model of the slipspace pathways in the back of her head, it would be easier to deal with? It was hard to think of that, honestly, when she was still receiving updates about where she was, and where she’d been, and where she could be.
She took another step through Slipspace in an attempt to distract herself, and emerged a few dozen feet to the right, staggering away from a tree which she instinctively feared she might intersect with. It didn’t really help; each movement brought more of that information, trickling through the back of her mind like a waterfall. Made of spiders.
"Euugh, that won’t work.." She felt kind of nauseous. It brought to mind the unlucky few sailors who had gone to sea and never lost their sea legs, remaining dizzy and sick forevermore. Was such a thing even possible? She’d always thought the Cardinal Runes provided some kind of protection against negative magic side-effects, but…
"No, no, no, absolutely not." The Sunsinger interrupted her own train of thought. She wasn’t going to let such an idea overwhelm her, especially given that she had no reason to believe it.
Perhaps Traversion was like exercise. If you sat for too long, your legs might fall asleep, and it felt strange and painful to walk on them until they woke again- but the process was hastened vastly thereby. She resolved to Blink again, but more slowly, deliberately. To immerse herself in the no-where between.
Imogen fixed her gaze on another point nearby and plotted out the direction through Slipspace once again. She stepped forward, pushing through the liminal cobwebs separating everything in the world, and opened her eyes, expecting to see the shining nothingness.
But it wasn’t nothing. Imogen’s eyes grew wide with shock and fear as she saw-
The Ork emerged from the slipspace, blinking. She was… well off from where she’d intended to go. The forest surrounding her was not quite the same as the one she’d stepped from, though she could feel that it wasn’t all that far.
She took a few more steps forward, reaching out with one hand to steady herself against a tree bole. This tree was stout and short, branches spreading in a wide canopy and shallow roots forming steps beneath it. A pool of shallow rainwater glimmered to the side.
"How the hell did I get this far?"
Carina had warned her of the dangers of wandering off in the Slipspace. Without a certain destination, it was easy for even an expert Traverser’s sojourn to become unmoored within the in-between realm, and then… well, nobody knew.
Yet even with those warnings ringing in her ears, it seemed that she had somehow gone astray. Perhaps she was too tired for this sort of thing; yes, she would hold off on any further Blinking for another day.
Come to think of it, why had she been jumping around like that? Just the wild energy of a new rune? She hadn’t been a teenager for years, and the notion that she’d given into childishness was a momentary embarrassment.
Imogen located a suitable tree and sat down in a hollow amidst the roots and trunk, leaning back and closing her eyes. Whatever had been driving her, she felt pretty peaceful right now. In fact- the Sunsinger focused her aether, materializing a great shining shield in front of her. Invoking the charm she’d worked into it to guard her dreams, Imogen ran a hand over the surface of her soul, then settled back for a nap.
And in the pool nearby, the twilight dappling of the sun beneath the trees was broken only momentarily, by the black-and-white snow of sudden static.
The Ork woman’s skin was cold, though not painfully so; the breeze bore the distant flush of ice, but only enough to chill, not to cut through cloth and skin alike as the high winds off the northern lakes. Her eyes took in deciduous trees, mixed with evergreens such that the treeline wasn’t quite skeletal, but certainly seemed… haggard. With her nose, Imogen could detect the subtle scents of thawed moss and frozen grass, riding just above the cold. Though her ears twitched, she heard little more than the creaking of the woods and occasional birdsong.
All of that added up to the obvious and unhelpful. She was in the woods, somewhere in northern Karnor. Maybe Dalquia, or perhaps she’d passed that land already? Hard to know.
No, the problem was the sixth sense. She could sense, in the darkness beyond her mind’s eye, the contours of the space beneath space, or perhaps between it, telling her where she was in relation to everywhere else she’d ever been.
"Oh, come on!" Imogen said aloud, exasperated, "I need to know where I am; I already know where I’m not!"
The woods did not answer, wherever they were.
~~~
The Cardinal Rune she received in Gel’Grandal had been her third such initiation, and where Reaving had been the agonizing culmination of a lifetime of preparation and Animus had been like a fever dream, Traversion was like a sucker punch. The pain had been sudden and impossible to prepare for, ripping away her reason in an instant, but disappearing with the rising sun.
The confusion, however, had not faded.
She had thought she understood the principles of slipspace, having accompanied the Railrunners on their jaunts for long. This was a mistake. She had known about the principles, had read the books about the principles, had talked to the practitioners and heard their descriptions and come away with an idea about how it all works which was not so much incorrect as incomplete.
“The basic working of a Cardinal Rune,” her uncle had told her, years before she was first branded with one, “is joinder. It’s a staple between the power and your soul. If you had a third arm grafted on, connected so perfectly that it could be moved like all the others, it would still take you time to feel it as part of yourself.”
Come to think of it, that analogy was uncomfortably literal for a girl who woke up one day with a lemur’s tail (which twitched involuntarily as she pondered it). Still, with both Reaving and Animus, she’d understood the things the magic worked upon. The sword had been her life, and her body… well, okay, that was also–and literally–her life. Traversers just waved a hand and made big holes appear in the air, or disappeared.
When she had first returned to her physical body from the astral and felt, really felt how thin the veil between space and slipspace was, it had made her nauseous. She’d been violently ill as she tried to realign herself in a world where all the rocks and trees and buildings suddenly seemed like they were stood upon shifting sands.
~~~
Even now, as Imogen steadied herself against the trunk of a tree, she felt like the world was spinning. She stared at the bark, feeling that just behind it, just beyond it, there was… not nowhere, not everywhere, just elsewhere.
Spurred by impulse and restless energy, Imogen looked at the world in front of her and the gap in the woods just a few meters away, and imagined how the distance would look in the slipspace. Well, it wouldn’t “look” like anything, of course, but the buzzing in the back of her mind made the intuitive leap anyway and she felt in her bones how to move from here to there.
The Sunsinger took a step, passing through the membrane between the worlds. It was thin- perhaps infinitely thin. Steps through a cobwebbed doorway were inexpressably more substantially impeded than this one, but, unlike those webs, the barrier between worlds never broke. It simply deformed around her as she moved, her body momentarily part of the multiversal meniscus.
The distance she’d selected in the material world was very small, and the distance she passed through in Slipspace all the smaller. It is said by scientists in the modern day that an individual who was teleported to the surface of a sun for a nanosecond and back would survive, would not even notice the trip had occurred for want of time for the forces to interact. Imogen’s blink wasn’t quite so short, but it was still like a flash in her eyes, and then…
…she stood in another location entirely.
"Alright, I just need a-a-a touchstone." Imogen resolved, shaky, ”People get used to this after a while, I’ve seen it happen; I know they do."
It was obviously a matter of experience- everything was. Perhaps if she closed herself off to the strange, ever-updating model of the slipspace pathways in the back of her head, it would be easier to deal with? It was hard to think of that, honestly, when she was still receiving updates about where she was, and where she’d been, and where she could be.
She took another step through Slipspace in an attempt to distract herself, and emerged a few dozen feet to the right, staggering away from a tree which she instinctively feared she might intersect with. It didn’t really help; each movement brought more of that information, trickling through the back of her mind like a waterfall. Made of spiders.
"Euugh, that won’t work.." She felt kind of nauseous. It brought to mind the unlucky few sailors who had gone to sea and never lost their sea legs, remaining dizzy and sick forevermore. Was such a thing even possible? She’d always thought the Cardinal Runes provided some kind of protection against negative magic side-effects, but…
"No, no, no, absolutely not." The Sunsinger interrupted her own train of thought. She wasn’t going to let such an idea overwhelm her, especially given that she had no reason to believe it.
Perhaps Traversion was like exercise. If you sat for too long, your legs might fall asleep, and it felt strange and painful to walk on them until they woke again- but the process was hastened vastly thereby. She resolved to Blink again, but more slowly, deliberately. To immerse herself in the no-where between.
Imogen fixed her gaze on another point nearby and plotted out the direction through Slipspace once again. She stepped forward, pushing through the liminal cobwebs separating everything in the world, and opened her eyes, expecting to see the shining nothingness.
But it wasn’t nothing. Imogen’s eyes grew wide with shock and fear as she saw-
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
~~~
The Ork emerged from the slipspace, blinking. She was… well off from where she’d intended to go. The forest surrounding her was not quite the same as the one she’d stepped from, though she could feel that it wasn’t all that far.
She took a few more steps forward, reaching out with one hand to steady herself against a tree bole. This tree was stout and short, branches spreading in a wide canopy and shallow roots forming steps beneath it. A pool of shallow rainwater glimmered to the side.
"How the hell did I get this far?"
Carina had warned her of the dangers of wandering off in the Slipspace. Without a certain destination, it was easy for even an expert Traverser’s sojourn to become unmoored within the in-between realm, and then… well, nobody knew.
Yet even with those warnings ringing in her ears, it seemed that she had somehow gone astray. Perhaps she was too tired for this sort of thing; yes, she would hold off on any further Blinking for another day.
Come to think of it, why had she been jumping around like that? Just the wild energy of a new rune? She hadn’t been a teenager for years, and the notion that she’d given into childishness was a momentary embarrassment.
Imogen located a suitable tree and sat down in a hollow amidst the roots and trunk, leaning back and closing her eyes. Whatever had been driving her, she felt pretty peaceful right now. In fact- the Sunsinger focused her aether, materializing a great shining shield in front of her. Invoking the charm she’d worked into it to guard her dreams, Imogen ran a hand over the surface of her soul, then settled back for a nap.
And in the pool nearby, the twilight dappling of the sun beneath the trees was broken only momentarily, by the black-and-white snow of sudden static.