Frost , 122
"How," Imogen said to nobody, in the dying light of the forest, the steaming corpse of a shadow-jaguar cooling at her feet, "Am I meant to stab them all?."
She had no way of knowing how many of the jaguars there were, but for them to have been a viable species before the Eclipse… thousands, at the least. Spread out over hundreds of square miles, each its own unholy terror which could not be permitted to continue in its rampage, and collectively an existential threat to the biosphere of Southern Ecith.
The witch slid to a sitting position next to the slain cat, examining it with a critical eye. She had no difficulty in killing the cats. If they were all together, in fact, her powers might well be sufficient to exterminate them all at one blow- but it was useless to think like that. If the entire Order in Zaichaer had but a single heart, she could have slain the lot of them in one blow, but they didn’t.
Closing her eyes, Imogen felt for the thread of the metal spirit’s disquiet again. It was easy to locate now, and she felt the frantic tug of it… but with new knowledge and focus, she could feel that this direction was but the most immediate such worry. She was, in sooth, being pulled in a thousand different directions.
Imogen felt annoyance twang through her being. Yet another job which had turned out fundamentally different than it had seemed. Still, she could hardly blame the little metal spirit, which was not accustomed to negotiation and had surely tried to communicate as best it could.
Well, fine. Stabbing was out. But what was her alternative?
As much as she was trained first and foremost as a warrior, the concept of observation and consideration were not wholly foreign concepts to the Sunsinger. She might be able to devise some larger-scale solution if she could understand the problem better. Why had the cats begun murdering their fellow creatures without reason? The eclipse was in some way related, of course, but how?
Imogen’s eyes slid to the corpse next to her, then narrowed.
It took much longer to create the Totem than she thought it would. Imogen had gotten quite good at assimilating the aetheric patterns of beasts over the past year, and she’d been talented from the start. Perhaps it was the basic paradox of the exercise; a mage’s creation of a Totem was the culmination of their understanding of the creature, and while Imogen understood how cats worked fine, she remained baffled by this particular species.
Still, if a little confusion was enough to counter the magic, no Totem would ever really function. After a few hours of focus, intentionally shutting herself to the feelings of metallic distress around her, the jaguar’s tooth faded into Imogen’s body and she felt the basic blueprint of the beast blossom within her aether.
When Imogen shifted into the cat (after stowing her clothing, a luxury she seldom seemed to encounter, and for which she was grateful) she noted several things immediately.
The small, dark cat stalked in a circle, trying out the function of her muscles. It seemed to her that what must be happening was that some spirit of shadow had granted this boon to the jaguars and tied them to the progress of the Eclipse.
A boon… or perhaps it was a curse?
The notion caught at Imogen’s mind, and she felt a sense of immediate clarity. The shadowcats were, after all, cats. They were viscous and brutal beasts, but they were animals, not instinctively prone to this kind of over-hunting. If they succeeded in slaughtering the biosphere of Southern Ecith they would surely die thereafter.
Fine, but what was she to do about it? The connection the creatures of Southern Ecith had to the elements was inborn, instilled at some deep level, and if there was any magic to sever that connection, she did not know it.
And yet- perhaps she erred by treating the jaguars entirely as creatures of instinct. Yes. Maybe there was a path forward here.
First, she would need to make this body more imposing. The shadow-glutted jaguars were large for their sort, but she bore the rune which was the gift of Aedrin, and there was more to nature than these cats could comprehend.
The shadow jaguar hunted its prey through the gloaming-paths of the deep forest, and it knew only absolute focus and bliss.
Through biology, under the auspice of Raella, it had been forged by vast time and unfathomable suffering from the rude pig iron of a thousand generations of lesser cats. It had been designed for the hunt, for the chase, to pursue. Its muscles thrilled to the task, adrenalin and dopamine mixing in a heady elixir inside, the raw energy of nature released and-
The hunt was interrupted as the air tore open in front of the cat, and another cat stepped through. She, too, was a jaguar, limbs wrapped in writhing shade, but there the similarities with the shadow jaguar ceased. The other cat was massive (the size of a horse, in fact, though the jaguar had never encountered an equine and had no basis for comparison), dwarfing him entirely, and her intense feline eyes were full of anger. Streamers of silver fire lit the other jaguar’s claws and fangs, pouring backwards and away like a mane of angry light.
The shadow jaguar backed away from the other huge cat, instantly cowed. Adrenaline and dopamine both died within his brain as he scrambled to produce the proper submissive indicia, to beg the huge cat not to kill him then and there.
"Shut up; stop mewling."
The shadow jaguars had no real language, of course, but this is what her growl and leer and body told him. He fell immediately silent, and the huge jaguar brought a paw down on him, crushing his body to the ground. He suppressed a yelp, feeling the cruel fires of her claws singing his fur.
"Listen to me, or I will kill you." The threat was overwhelming; it rolled off the huge female in waves. "This whole forest is my hunting-ground, and you are all misbehaving."
Threatening the jaguars individually into compliance was, if anything, a slower scheme than simply murdering them. Thankfully, Imogen thought that the cats were just smart enough to accomplish one thing more.
"You will find the others and bring them to me. If you do this, you will live; if you do not, I will kill you. If they will not follow, make them follow, or I will kill you both."
It was best, when speaking the language of beasts, to be quite explicit with your threats.
It took some time, of course. As fast as the jaguars were, they could still only hunt each other so well. Some of the beasts feigned submission, but tried to ignore Jaguogen’s command once she had gone. A few even refused, tried to fight with her.
It did not go well for them.
Weeks later, Imoguar had rounded up the bulk of the shadow-infused cats. They slinked in from the forest, some submissive, some doing everything in their power to hide their fear. She had gathered them to a clearing, which made them even more uncomfortable; in the old days, when the sun had still been a real threat, they would have sought to avoid places like this where the shadows which hid them could be banished by the baleful light in the sky.
Still, they filed in. Jaguars were not particularly social animals, but they understood well the ideas of dominance and submission, of threats and danger and survival. Only a few had bothered to challenge the massive cat sitting on the knoll at the clearing’s heart; their guts and shadow decorated the ground at its base.
Indeed, in some ways their natural individualistic natures made them easy prey for Imogen’s simple technique. There was no consideration of banding together to take out the huge cat, no abstract decisions of social hierarchies to be made. The biggest, meanest cat had forced them all to show up here today, and there was nothing to be done about it.
Imogen didn’t imagine that she’d gathered up every one of the beasts, but quick math confirmed for her that there were thousands of the creatures present here. That would be enough.
"Listen to me." Imoguar said, her growls projecting throughout the clearing. "You have abused the hospitality of this land and grown greedy and stupid."
The cats sat and stared. The huge cat was speaking their language, in a sense, but these were not concepts which they had ever given much weight or thought. Surely now that they had the strength to enjoy themselves, they should do it?
"I will show you what is wrong, and you will stop. Submit to this now, or leave."
A few of the jaguars began to slowly move away, cautiously testing whether they could, indeed, simply-
The clearing filled with thuds as the darkling skies released a volley of spears into the earth. Each of the cats who had indicated that they would not listen had been spitted. More cats leapt to their feet, making as if to flee.
"Stop!"
The cats paused, frozen with fear at Imogen’s growl.
A great metal plane emerged from the air above Imogen’s head, then filled itself with stars. The cats were drawn to look at it by the sudden burst of movement and light. The shield shone with a brilliant silver light as the Window opened upon it.
And here, with a whole race of shadow-creatures looking to the same place, Imogen reenacted her original ritual which had led to her meeting with the metal Essenti in the first place. The center of her shield rippled like water and pulled away, exposing the Dreamstone within it.
Into that stone, Imogen fed the fragile contact to the shadows she had acquired from this totem, along with the attention of the thousands of watching cats. The somnosyte’s calm glow began to darken as it illuminated the invisible connection between the cats and the shadow spirit waiting beyond the veil of worlds.
Imogen’s connection was too fragile to move through, even in dreams. She could not hope to confront the source of the energies driving these jaguars to frenzy. But in the light of the nova-fire, through the flickering bridge of dreams, the burgeoning spirit of shadow was revealed to the senses of everyone in the clearing.
And there were plenty of creatures here which could move through the shadow realm.
"Kill that."
One by one, the jaguars slipped through the shadows cast by Imogen’s shining silver Pact Weapon and converged on the spirit which had encouraged them to grow and kill in the first place. Through the flickering bridge, Imogen observed the aetheric cat in the realm beyond as the first jaguars fell upon it, shock and pain and dismay coming from it so powerfully that the darkness throughout the entire clearing rippled in disquiet.
The chaotic fallout of the sudden attack disturbed the aether of the place dramatically, and Imogen’s fragile rite was shattered in an instant. Her Dreamstone grew dark, and the silvery illumination in the clearing failed utterly. She waited there for a few minutes, wondering whether the cat army she’d gathered had failed, slain by the spirit, or perhaps lost in the shadow forever, unable to return. She sincerely doubted they’d actually managed to kill the spirit in its own realm, but she hoped it was sufficiently chastened so as to flee far afield.
A few minutes later, however, the first of the jaguars returned to the darkened clearing, panting lightly as it sought to settle itself. More returned thereon- hundreds, to be sure, and maybe even thousands still. In the darkness, she could not be sure.
"Good." said the huge cat, when enough of them had returned. "Kill to eat and you will live. Be lazy and proud and aloof. If you kill just for killing, I’ll kill you."
A hole opened in space outside of the tree where Imogen had stashed her stuff all those long days ago, and a huge cat stalked out. It closed its eyes and rapidly shrank, the power of the Rune of Animus liquefying flesh and changing mass to magic. Within moments, a nude Orkhan woman stood in the dark of the forest.
"There." Imogen said to herself, and the forest, and the metal spirit. "That should do it, I think. Probably. A classic Zaichaeri witch’s working. And now-"
Imogen reached up to the hollow bole of the tree and pulled out her shirt- only to find that it was burnt and torn to shit. Also? Covered in shit.
"Wh-"
There was a chittering of laughter from above, and Imogen’s head snapped up in time to see the troupe of fire-monkeys scattering, hooting and hollering at the top of their lungs.
"What the fuck!" the Ork swore, thwarted for the third time by monkeys. "Why? Why!" How had they tracked her? How did they find her so many miles inland? Why had they waited for so many months to complete their stupid, shitty revenge?
Only the hollow laughter of the tiny apes answered.
"How," Imogen said to nobody, in the dying light of the forest, the steaming corpse of a shadow-jaguar cooling at her feet, "Am I meant to stab them all?."
She had no way of knowing how many of the jaguars there were, but for them to have been a viable species before the Eclipse… thousands, at the least. Spread out over hundreds of square miles, each its own unholy terror which could not be permitted to continue in its rampage, and collectively an existential threat to the biosphere of Southern Ecith.
The witch slid to a sitting position next to the slain cat, examining it with a critical eye. She had no difficulty in killing the cats. If they were all together, in fact, her powers might well be sufficient to exterminate them all at one blow- but it was useless to think like that. If the entire Order in Zaichaer had but a single heart, she could have slain the lot of them in one blow, but they didn’t.
Closing her eyes, Imogen felt for the thread of the metal spirit’s disquiet again. It was easy to locate now, and she felt the frantic tug of it… but with new knowledge and focus, she could feel that this direction was but the most immediate such worry. She was, in sooth, being pulled in a thousand different directions.
Imogen felt annoyance twang through her being. Yet another job which had turned out fundamentally different than it had seemed. Still, she could hardly blame the little metal spirit, which was not accustomed to negotiation and had surely tried to communicate as best it could.
Well, fine. Stabbing was out. But what was her alternative?
As much as she was trained first and foremost as a warrior, the concept of observation and consideration were not wholly foreign concepts to the Sunsinger. She might be able to devise some larger-scale solution if she could understand the problem better. Why had the cats begun murdering their fellow creatures without reason? The eclipse was in some way related, of course, but how?
Imogen’s eyes slid to the corpse next to her, then narrowed.
~~~
It took much longer to create the Totem than she thought it would. Imogen had gotten quite good at assimilating the aetheric patterns of beasts over the past year, and she’d been talented from the start. Perhaps it was the basic paradox of the exercise; a mage’s creation of a Totem was the culmination of their understanding of the creature, and while Imogen understood how cats worked fine, she remained baffled by this particular species.
Still, if a little confusion was enough to counter the magic, no Totem would ever really function. After a few hours of focus, intentionally shutting herself to the feelings of metallic distress around her, the jaguar’s tooth faded into Imogen’s body and she felt the basic blueprint of the beast blossom within her aether.
When Imogen shifted into the cat (after stowing her clothing, a luxury she seldom seemed to encounter, and for which she was grateful) she noted several things immediately.
- The body she’d created through Animus was not nearly so large as the cat she’d slain had been. A jaguar, it transpired, was not meant to be the size of a small bear.
- It was not meant to have such extravagant powers as shifting between shadows. Through her mastery of Animus she could do no more than instinctively bend existing darkness around the cat, like a shroud.
- Yet, she could feel something in the back of her spirit, like a distorted reflection of the shining metal thread she’d been gifted by the elemental spirit.
The small, dark cat stalked in a circle, trying out the function of her muscles. It seemed to her that what must be happening was that some spirit of shadow had granted this boon to the jaguars and tied them to the progress of the Eclipse.
A boon… or perhaps it was a curse?
The notion caught at Imogen’s mind, and she felt a sense of immediate clarity. The shadowcats were, after all, cats. They were viscous and brutal beasts, but they were animals, not instinctively prone to this kind of over-hunting. If they succeeded in slaughtering the biosphere of Southern Ecith they would surely die thereafter.
Fine, but what was she to do about it? The connection the creatures of Southern Ecith had to the elements was inborn, instilled at some deep level, and if there was any magic to sever that connection, she did not know it.
And yet- perhaps she erred by treating the jaguars entirely as creatures of instinct. Yes. Maybe there was a path forward here.
First, she would need to make this body more imposing. The shadow-glutted jaguars were large for their sort, but she bore the rune which was the gift of Aedrin, and there was more to nature than these cats could comprehend.
~~~
The shadow jaguar hunted its prey through the gloaming-paths of the deep forest, and it knew only absolute focus and bliss.
Through biology, under the auspice of Raella, it had been forged by vast time and unfathomable suffering from the rude pig iron of a thousand generations of lesser cats. It had been designed for the hunt, for the chase, to pursue. Its muscles thrilled to the task, adrenalin and dopamine mixing in a heady elixir inside, the raw energy of nature released and-
The hunt was interrupted as the air tore open in front of the cat, and another cat stepped through. She, too, was a jaguar, limbs wrapped in writhing shade, but there the similarities with the shadow jaguar ceased. The other cat was massive (the size of a horse, in fact, though the jaguar had never encountered an equine and had no basis for comparison), dwarfing him entirely, and her intense feline eyes were full of anger. Streamers of silver fire lit the other jaguar’s claws and fangs, pouring backwards and away like a mane of angry light.
The shadow jaguar backed away from the other huge cat, instantly cowed. Adrenaline and dopamine both died within his brain as he scrambled to produce the proper submissive indicia, to beg the huge cat not to kill him then and there.
"Shut up; stop mewling."
The shadow jaguars had no real language, of course, but this is what her growl and leer and body told him. He fell immediately silent, and the huge jaguar brought a paw down on him, crushing his body to the ground. He suppressed a yelp, feeling the cruel fires of her claws singing his fur.
"Listen to me, or I will kill you." The threat was overwhelming; it rolled off the huge female in waves. "This whole forest is my hunting-ground, and you are all misbehaving."
Threatening the jaguars individually into compliance was, if anything, a slower scheme than simply murdering them. Thankfully, Imogen thought that the cats were just smart enough to accomplish one thing more.
"You will find the others and bring them to me. If you do this, you will live; if you do not, I will kill you. If they will not follow, make them follow, or I will kill you both."
It was best, when speaking the language of beasts, to be quite explicit with your threats.
~~~
It took some time, of course. As fast as the jaguars were, they could still only hunt each other so well. Some of the beasts feigned submission, but tried to ignore Jaguogen’s command once she had gone. A few even refused, tried to fight with her.
It did not go well for them.
Weeks later, Imoguar had rounded up the bulk of the shadow-infused cats. They slinked in from the forest, some submissive, some doing everything in their power to hide their fear. She had gathered them to a clearing, which made them even more uncomfortable; in the old days, when the sun had still been a real threat, they would have sought to avoid places like this where the shadows which hid them could be banished by the baleful light in the sky.
Still, they filed in. Jaguars were not particularly social animals, but they understood well the ideas of dominance and submission, of threats and danger and survival. Only a few had bothered to challenge the massive cat sitting on the knoll at the clearing’s heart; their guts and shadow decorated the ground at its base.
Indeed, in some ways their natural individualistic natures made them easy prey for Imogen’s simple technique. There was no consideration of banding together to take out the huge cat, no abstract decisions of social hierarchies to be made. The biggest, meanest cat had forced them all to show up here today, and there was nothing to be done about it.
Imogen didn’t imagine that she’d gathered up every one of the beasts, but quick math confirmed for her that there were thousands of the creatures present here. That would be enough.
"Listen to me." Imoguar said, her growls projecting throughout the clearing. "You have abused the hospitality of this land and grown greedy and stupid."
The cats sat and stared. The huge cat was speaking their language, in a sense, but these were not concepts which they had ever given much weight or thought. Surely now that they had the strength to enjoy themselves, they should do it?
"I will show you what is wrong, and you will stop. Submit to this now, or leave."
A few of the jaguars began to slowly move away, cautiously testing whether they could, indeed, simply-
The clearing filled with thuds as the darkling skies released a volley of spears into the earth. Each of the cats who had indicated that they would not listen had been spitted. More cats leapt to their feet, making as if to flee.
"Stop!"
The cats paused, frozen with fear at Imogen’s growl.
A great metal plane emerged from the air above Imogen’s head, then filled itself with stars. The cats were drawn to look at it by the sudden burst of movement and light. The shield shone with a brilliant silver light as the Window opened upon it.
And here, with a whole race of shadow-creatures looking to the same place, Imogen reenacted her original ritual which had led to her meeting with the metal Essenti in the first place. The center of her shield rippled like water and pulled away, exposing the Dreamstone within it.
Into that stone, Imogen fed the fragile contact to the shadows she had acquired from this totem, along with the attention of the thousands of watching cats. The somnosyte’s calm glow began to darken as it illuminated the invisible connection between the cats and the shadow spirit waiting beyond the veil of worlds.
Imogen’s connection was too fragile to move through, even in dreams. She could not hope to confront the source of the energies driving these jaguars to frenzy. But in the light of the nova-fire, through the flickering bridge of dreams, the burgeoning spirit of shadow was revealed to the senses of everyone in the clearing.
And there were plenty of creatures here which could move through the shadow realm.
"Kill that."
One by one, the jaguars slipped through the shadows cast by Imogen’s shining silver Pact Weapon and converged on the spirit which had encouraged them to grow and kill in the first place. Through the flickering bridge, Imogen observed the aetheric cat in the realm beyond as the first jaguars fell upon it, shock and pain and dismay coming from it so powerfully that the darkness throughout the entire clearing rippled in disquiet.
The chaotic fallout of the sudden attack disturbed the aether of the place dramatically, and Imogen’s fragile rite was shattered in an instant. Her Dreamstone grew dark, and the silvery illumination in the clearing failed utterly. She waited there for a few minutes, wondering whether the cat army she’d gathered had failed, slain by the spirit, or perhaps lost in the shadow forever, unable to return. She sincerely doubted they’d actually managed to kill the spirit in its own realm, but she hoped it was sufficiently chastened so as to flee far afield.
A few minutes later, however, the first of the jaguars returned to the darkened clearing, panting lightly as it sought to settle itself. More returned thereon- hundreds, to be sure, and maybe even thousands still. In the darkness, she could not be sure.
"Good." said the huge cat, when enough of them had returned. "Kill to eat and you will live. Be lazy and proud and aloof. If you kill just for killing, I’ll kill you."
~~~
A hole opened in space outside of the tree where Imogen had stashed her stuff all those long days ago, and a huge cat stalked out. It closed its eyes and rapidly shrank, the power of the Rune of Animus liquefying flesh and changing mass to magic. Within moments, a nude Orkhan woman stood in the dark of the forest.
"There." Imogen said to herself, and the forest, and the metal spirit. "That should do it, I think. Probably. A classic Zaichaeri witch’s working. And now-"
Imogen reached up to the hollow bole of the tree and pulled out her shirt- only to find that it was burnt and torn to shit. Also? Covered in shit.
"Wh-"
There was a chittering of laughter from above, and Imogen’s head snapped up in time to see the troupe of fire-monkeys scattering, hooting and hollering at the top of their lungs.
"What the fuck!" the Ork swore, thwarted for the third time by monkeys. "Why? Why!" How had they tracked her? How did they find her so many miles inland? Why had they waited for so many months to complete their stupid, shitty revenge?
Only the hollow laughter of the tiny apes answered.
