Frost , 122
The witch wandered upon the wind, set on one thing; others of her ilk. Not other witches, of course, though that would have been a stroke of luck. Not Orkhan either, though the witch was one herself. Not even adventurers, though there was an argument to be made that the objects of her quest satisfied that requirement.
No, Imogen Ward was looking for seagulls.
The albatross landed on a rock, having noticed that it was decorated with several desiccated eel corpses. As she’d hoped, it wasn’t long before this fact was noticed by other birds, and within moments there were no less than three ‘gulls jockying for position on the breeze about the stone.
"Well hello there!." the larger seabird called, "Fancy seeing you all here!"
“Shut it!” screamed one of the gulls.
“Get away!”
“That’s mine!”
Not nearly as friendly as the lemurs, then. Nor as pliable as her kitties. Well, no use giving up before the effort was even really underway. "Whoa, whoa, whoa, let’s not get all up in arms over my eel here-"
“My eel!”
“Not yours!”
“Fuck you!”
That one almost gave Imogen pause. The power of echolalia was a little tricky to understand if you thought about it too much- obviously, the seagulls did not speak Common, and they certainly didn’t use idiom. On the whole, however, she thought it was more likely that the bird was insulting her than propositioning.
"It can be your eel, yes. All you’ve got to do is answer one question."
The gulls flung more abuse at her, but Imogen had come to expect this. Animals were not necessarily familiar with abstract concepts like “exchange” or even “not getting what you want instantly but perhaps taking actions to get it later.” It seemed as though these birds were more adapted to scream insults than conduct trade, but patience and a little bribery would usually win through.
"Boys, hear me out- I just need to know where to find a big island."
The witch had spent a few days on her weird quest, and it was beginning to get pretty discouraging. Seagulls were usually familiar with the location of at least one island, but they were not naturally disposed to understanding what she meant by ‘big’, and they continually directed her to what were, basically, wet rocks.
(Worse yet, it turned out that seagulls were one of the few animals she’d met thus far which were familiar with the concept of lying. Not all of her bribes had turned up any rock at all.)
Still, Imogen was nothing if not persistent when pursuing one of her inane schemes, and there were plenty of birds in the sea. (Over the sea?) So it was that, after several days of searching and bribing and lies and deceit, she came across a suitable island.
It wasn’t a large island, not by any stretch of the imagination. It crested eighty meters over the sea, at around the same height as the peak of the cliffs of the mainland it bordered, and the isle’s stark basalt spire was framed by a thin sandbar beach and sparse vegetation. Albagen gave it a few once-overs in the air, seabird eyes scanning the whole of the edifice for any signs of animal life.
A few birds. A few bugs. A snake. A stand of coconuts facing the inner sea, undoubtedly deposited long ago by some storm or another. Strands of moss, layers of lichen. A few scuttling hermit crabs.
Acceptable losses.
She didn’t love the idea, even now, but what else could she do about it? That… ill rock… inland was spreading its poison across the open land, and she was out of ideas for how to destroy the damned thing. Shattering rocks just meant they covered a larger area; anywhere she moved it to, the effect would be the same. She’d considered chucking the thing in a volcano, but for all she knew that would just create poisoned gasses and kill everything within a hundred miles.
The Ork was not a scientist, but she’d done her best to play pretend in the absence of Avamande. With great caution, she’d transported a tiny fragment of the devil-rock to a campsite and observed its range and speed of effect. She’d tried containing it with a ward (useless), wooden boxes (worthless) and beneath a stone (somewhat effective), but found that there was only one element which would truly work to estop the demon stone’s influence.
Water.
She needed this island to have a cavern–not that she expected a great cave system, but at least a hollow–and it did, though not one sized for an Orkhan’s entry. That was no problem. Imogen assumed her small lemur-form and spelunked carefully, blinking as needed to take herself through the nearly-disconnected spaces between the small caverns.
Even this, so close to perfect, wasn’t quite enough, but Imogen could not allow perfect to be the enemy of the good. Once she’d found a fairly central hollow, one around sea level and deep enough into the small island’s rock, she called forth her pact staff and affixed it to the ceiling to give herself light, then flexed her little lemur hands until very un-monkeylike claws emerged from the tips of her fingers.
It was a weird look, but the witch didn’t intend to get distracted by weird, not now. Instead, she raised her claws to the level of her monkey eyes and focused on them. After a moment, silver light limned the unnatural claws, which then themselves began to fluctuate, growing almost translucent as she poured the powers of the Cardinal Runes of Reaving and Traversion into them. Imogen intermixed the three magics with care, satisfied only when the Varnish was well and truly applied.
When she was done, her strange lemur-claws glimmered with unnatural energies, a shimmer produced by the confused interaction between light and spatial portal. Imogen focused once more, calling to mind the fathomless stamina of her horse totem, summoning its strength and endurance for the job ahead.
Then she began to dig a hole in the solid rock.
Even with her preternatural stamina and portal-claws which could gouge through solid rock like butter, it took a long time to finish. This didn’t bother Imogen. Time, too, was part of her plan.
The lemur’s technique was methodical- she scored a ring around each new layer to excavate, then dragged her claws in circles within that ring, as though she were using her fingernails to peel the skin off the world’s largest apple. Lines of stone fell away into Slipspace as she worked, strange spirals of solid basalt dropping away into the void to join the other unidentifiable ruins floating in nothing.
It should have been a work of monumental strain, but the portal-claw method of excavation did not require much force. Just careful repetition. The monkey spun around in ever-dwindling circles for hours before she at last chose to depart the little isle for her own hammock a few miles down the beach. When the sun came back up, so too did Imogen arrive to repeat the cycle.
This, she did for days.
It occurred to the witch, as she dug, that this could all be for naught if she ran out of rock. If the floor opened up beneath her work into some kind of underground river, or–gods all forbid it–a hollow into the open sea. It seemed to Imogen that the little sliver of demon rock she’d tested had been less harmful when submerged, but she wasn’t willing to test what would happen if the entire thing were set adrift in the invisible currents below the waves. Who could say what kind of damage that would cause?
Thankfully, fortune was with Imogen. (Not literally; he was still snoozing on the beach) After several days of work, she adjudged that her hollow was now deep enough to submerge the demon rock entirely, several feet below the surface of the water. The witch-turned-interior-pool-installer considered the notion of filling it with seawater now to prevent anything from moving in, but quickly abandoned the thought. This procedure was going to be hard enough as it was; no reason to introduce a new variable into the necessary feat of Traversion.
With her island and secret hole secured, Imogen climbed back up onto the beach and returned herself to Orkhan form, kneeling at the edge of the surf to wash the sand and grime off herself. She lay back in the shallow tide, enjoying the sensation of the sea’s caress. It reminded her of-
Well, best to just lie here and enjoy it for now. The next step was the last step to address the damnable demon rock, and it was going to be a lot harder than everything which had come before.
The witch wandered upon the wind, set on one thing; others of her ilk. Not other witches, of course, though that would have been a stroke of luck. Not Orkhan either, though the witch was one herself. Not even adventurers, though there was an argument to be made that the objects of her quest satisfied that requirement.
No, Imogen Ward was looking for seagulls.
~~~
The albatross landed on a rock, having noticed that it was decorated with several desiccated eel corpses. As she’d hoped, it wasn’t long before this fact was noticed by other birds, and within moments there were no less than three ‘gulls jockying for position on the breeze about the stone.
"Well hello there!." the larger seabird called, "Fancy seeing you all here!"
“Shut it!” screamed one of the gulls.
“Get away!”
“That’s mine!”
Not nearly as friendly as the lemurs, then. Nor as pliable as her kitties. Well, no use giving up before the effort was even really underway. "Whoa, whoa, whoa, let’s not get all up in arms over my eel here-"
“My eel!”
“Not yours!”
“Fuck you!”
That one almost gave Imogen pause. The power of echolalia was a little tricky to understand if you thought about it too much- obviously, the seagulls did not speak Common, and they certainly didn’t use idiom. On the whole, however, she thought it was more likely that the bird was insulting her than propositioning.
"It can be your eel, yes. All you’ve got to do is answer one question."
The gulls flung more abuse at her, but Imogen had come to expect this. Animals were not necessarily familiar with abstract concepts like “exchange” or even “not getting what you want instantly but perhaps taking actions to get it later.” It seemed as though these birds were more adapted to scream insults than conduct trade, but patience and a little bribery would usually win through.
"Boys, hear me out- I just need to know where to find a big island."
~~~
The witch had spent a few days on her weird quest, and it was beginning to get pretty discouraging. Seagulls were usually familiar with the location of at least one island, but they were not naturally disposed to understanding what she meant by ‘big’, and they continually directed her to what were, basically, wet rocks.
(Worse yet, it turned out that seagulls were one of the few animals she’d met thus far which were familiar with the concept of lying. Not all of her bribes had turned up any rock at all.)
Still, Imogen was nothing if not persistent when pursuing one of her inane schemes, and there were plenty of birds in the sea. (Over the sea?) So it was that, after several days of searching and bribing and lies and deceit, she came across a suitable island.
It wasn’t a large island, not by any stretch of the imagination. It crested eighty meters over the sea, at around the same height as the peak of the cliffs of the mainland it bordered, and the isle’s stark basalt spire was framed by a thin sandbar beach and sparse vegetation. Albagen gave it a few once-overs in the air, seabird eyes scanning the whole of the edifice for any signs of animal life.
A few birds. A few bugs. A snake. A stand of coconuts facing the inner sea, undoubtedly deposited long ago by some storm or another. Strands of moss, layers of lichen. A few scuttling hermit crabs.
Acceptable losses.
She didn’t love the idea, even now, but what else could she do about it? That… ill rock… inland was spreading its poison across the open land, and she was out of ideas for how to destroy the damned thing. Shattering rocks just meant they covered a larger area; anywhere she moved it to, the effect would be the same. She’d considered chucking the thing in a volcano, but for all she knew that would just create poisoned gasses and kill everything within a hundred miles.
The Ork was not a scientist, but she’d done her best to play pretend in the absence of Avamande. With great caution, she’d transported a tiny fragment of the devil-rock to a campsite and observed its range and speed of effect. She’d tried containing it with a ward (useless), wooden boxes (worthless) and beneath a stone (somewhat effective), but found that there was only one element which would truly work to estop the demon stone’s influence.
Water.
She needed this island to have a cavern–not that she expected a great cave system, but at least a hollow–and it did, though not one sized for an Orkhan’s entry. That was no problem. Imogen assumed her small lemur-form and spelunked carefully, blinking as needed to take herself through the nearly-disconnected spaces between the small caverns.
Even this, so close to perfect, wasn’t quite enough, but Imogen could not allow perfect to be the enemy of the good. Once she’d found a fairly central hollow, one around sea level and deep enough into the small island’s rock, she called forth her pact staff and affixed it to the ceiling to give herself light, then flexed her little lemur hands until very un-monkeylike claws emerged from the tips of her fingers.
It was a weird look, but the witch didn’t intend to get distracted by weird, not now. Instead, she raised her claws to the level of her monkey eyes and focused on them. After a moment, silver light limned the unnatural claws, which then themselves began to fluctuate, growing almost translucent as she poured the powers of the Cardinal Runes of Reaving and Traversion into them. Imogen intermixed the three magics with care, satisfied only when the Varnish was well and truly applied.
When she was done, her strange lemur-claws glimmered with unnatural energies, a shimmer produced by the confused interaction between light and spatial portal. Imogen focused once more, calling to mind the fathomless stamina of her horse totem, summoning its strength and endurance for the job ahead.
Then she began to dig a hole in the solid rock.
~~~
Even with her preternatural stamina and portal-claws which could gouge through solid rock like butter, it took a long time to finish. This didn’t bother Imogen. Time, too, was part of her plan.
The lemur’s technique was methodical- she scored a ring around each new layer to excavate, then dragged her claws in circles within that ring, as though she were using her fingernails to peel the skin off the world’s largest apple. Lines of stone fell away into Slipspace as she worked, strange spirals of solid basalt dropping away into the void to join the other unidentifiable ruins floating in nothing.
It should have been a work of monumental strain, but the portal-claw method of excavation did not require much force. Just careful repetition. The monkey spun around in ever-dwindling circles for hours before she at last chose to depart the little isle for her own hammock a few miles down the beach. When the sun came back up, so too did Imogen arrive to repeat the cycle.
This, she did for days.
It occurred to the witch, as she dug, that this could all be for naught if she ran out of rock. If the floor opened up beneath her work into some kind of underground river, or–gods all forbid it–a hollow into the open sea. It seemed to Imogen that the little sliver of demon rock she’d tested had been less harmful when submerged, but she wasn’t willing to test what would happen if the entire thing were set adrift in the invisible currents below the waves. Who could say what kind of damage that would cause?
Thankfully, fortune was with Imogen. (Not literally; he was still snoozing on the beach) After several days of work, she adjudged that her hollow was now deep enough to submerge the demon rock entirely, several feet below the surface of the water. The witch-turned-interior-pool-installer considered the notion of filling it with seawater now to prevent anything from moving in, but quickly abandoned the thought. This procedure was going to be hard enough as it was; no reason to introduce a new variable into the necessary feat of Traversion.
With her island and secret hole secured, Imogen climbed back up onto the beach and returned herself to Orkhan form, kneeling at the edge of the surf to wash the sand and grime off herself. She lay back in the shallow tide, enjoying the sensation of the sea’s caress. It reminded her of-
Well, best to just lie here and enjoy it for now. The next step was the last step to address the damnable demon rock, and it was going to be a lot harder than everything which had come before.
