Searing, 49 122
It had been more than a year since Imogen Ward had last visited the village, and she was heartened to see that Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv was doing well.
She’d left in a state, having just aided them in unfreezing the reservoir surrounded by the village, making a mad dash for Drathera in the wake of the chaos storms. Then, the trees had been afflicted with patches of frost, and many of the houses built around the great central falls were discolored by brushes with the wild mists.
Now, however, things seemed almost exactly as they had when she’d first journeyed here… with one major exception. The sky.
Somehow, she’d almost gotten used to the absence of day and the constant red glow of the Great Eclipse in her day-to-day life, but the moment of seeing the village highlighted against the red moon, its roofs rising above the ruddy spray somehow brought the comparison to the front of her mind.
The thought sent a wave of sadness and ennui through her, but there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. She set off into the village.
She wasn’t greeted in Gihah with raucous shouts of joy or anything, but the people of the village were pretty spread out. The ones who were close enough to Chief Oping’s house, either as residents or simply on business, did actually cheer a little to see her. They waved, or ran over to say hello, to ask questions about where she’d been and what she’d been doing.
Hello, she told many people in many different words, I’m doing well, yes, it’s good to see you too. I’m on my way to see the Chief. I’m just here to say hi, I was just in the area and wanted to stop in.
They’d had word from Drathera by now, of course; Gihah was seldom the first village in Ecith to get news, but a year was enough time to have been visited by members of the Shield Legion multiple times. It had been enough of a shock when the Dread Mists had rolled through their own village, had nearly ended their centuries-long stalemate with the fire mountain in tragedy. To hear it was nation-wide…
Worldwide. she corrected a dozen different people, Everywhere was consumed with chaos, and then the darkness came….
It wasn’t until, at the last, she reached Chief Oping that she learned something new.
“The Great Eclipse…” he told her, after they’d embraced and he’d invited her inside to sit down, “...it hasn’t been so bad here. The fish remain in the lake and the rivers. The cider has been harder to make, though. We’ve noticed the trees have fruited less.”
It was a dire statement. Ecith was, agriculturally speaking, a land of abundant blessing. The soils inspired plants to grow huge, of course, but also to grow quickly. When she was here last, she’d been informed that they did not find it that unusual to conduct three or four harvests in a single year. This year? Barely one.
“Some of our hunters have seen the void creatures.” he acknowledged, “And the legionnaires speak of them. But they do not come into the village. They seem drawn west, away from the water. Perhaps Gihah’s spirit protects us?”
Imogen did not think it likely. The monsters feared nothing but sunlight, and while the village’s aquamancy was formidable she saw no particular reason that the creatures would be vulnerable to it.
”I wish we knew the cause.” the witch lamented.
“We do,” responded the Chief, raising a brow, “It is obvious. The god of shadows is ascendant, and this is his coronation. In the time of ascent, it is natural for the order of things to be upended. But as the darkness passes after the fire-mount erupts, so too must order reassert itself.”
”I… see.” Imogen responded. It was a hopeful idea, and one with comprehensible logic. ”Then you believe we will be alright?”
“I did not say that. The time which is a blink of an eye to the gods is time enough for the world to starve. Let us talk of lighter things. You say you are visiting because you are in the area? Where are you headed?”
”First, to Koidhouo’uv. And then… there is one other friend I need to speak to. Just in case.”
Imogen Ward approached Koidhouo’uv for a second time, though with a different set of companions.
Where previously she’d taken the network of latticed streams and creeks which criss-crossed the fire-swamp, this time she simply approached from the air. It offered her much less in the way of camouflage against the Primal’s supernal senses, but she knew now that Koid did not wake easily, and she suspected that this unnatural Frost would have weakened the fire primal’s own power. She was quite confident that she could enter the mountain’s caverns and leave before ever it rose to chase, at least as long as no fucking ghosts decided to rouse it.
So she soared now above the scorched trees which stood sentinel over the banished Primal’s lands, her shadow flickering over fire-fungus and grazing Koidspawn below.
Koidhouo’uv was a squat dome of a mountain, grey and black-veined and oddly dreary in the otherwise-verdant fire-swamp. It was less a mountain than a scab, a great oversized mound of dried world-blood, drawn from the living stone below to shield its slumbering master from the acrid tears of the sky.
From her prior visit, Imogen knew well that the mound was honeycombed with tunnels and caverns, both natural cracks created as the lava cooled and hardened and larger tunnels bored out of the mountain by the primal and his herds. With a little time and effort, she could have pinpointed the vent she’d entered last time in lemur-form and scampered through those caverns until she found the fire at its heart.
But her powers had grown since the last visit. Not enough that she intended to challenge Koidhouo’uv’s master–not yet–but enough to let her skip the interminable dark halls within. Anyway, she didn’t intend to dwadle here. Even if Koid was sleeping, it was a place of anger and pain, compounded for Gods-knew how long, and she wasn’t interested in an extended stay.
As the albatross flew above the squat mountain, she focused her power, taking hold of the veil between worlds. She dove for the center of the dome; not a fast, vertical, dramatic dive like a falcon might, but more of a steep incline, for a seabird’s wings were not really meant for more. The rocks rose up to meet her…
And then seemed to shatter.
Imogen’s magic punched through space, and the air fell away like glass, revealing slipspace beyond. The shards reformed as she slipped quietly through, reality patching itself together behind her as she navigated briefly through the unceasing nowhere which underlaid all reality.
Then she punched through again, the slipspace shattering to reveal a hole into the dark cavern beyond. The albatross flew in silently, flapping only twice to slow her momentum.
This was the cave at the heart of Koidhouo’uv, a huge, artificial cavern the size of Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv itself. The ground below (for it had once been the surface, before Koid pulled up the dome over itself) was covered in rubble and shrouded in shadow.
Imogen glided (glode?) silently to a perch on a nearby wall and reconfigured her eyes, blinking rapidly as she adjusted them before assessing the cave.
The last time she’d been here, the witch had worn the form of a lemur, insufficiently comfortable with the power of Animus to do anything more. Now, however, myriad possibilities were open to her. A few minutes of experimentation produced a chimeric blend of cat and eagle eye which allowed her to comfortably take in the shadowy cavern in great detail.
The dark cavern floor was, as she’d expected, dotted with the forms of the Koid’s herd. They were strange creatures, like dark antelope, though somewhat too bulky for the breed, and even asleep they glowed with barely-contained fire. They were, in fact, a lot like the creatures of Southern Ecith in that way, corrupted with elementalism.
Most of them slumbered in groups in the open, obeying some ancient instinct to congregate. The largest, however, slept near the center. And there, in the center, was Koid itself.
The Vonaiad Koid was enormous, larger by far than the ancient hydra she’d slain months prior, second only to the great dragon Exathun in her memory- and even then, a close second. Its skin was black, and she was sure that it was literally made of obsidian, but even asleep, lava dripped from its enormous eyes, providing soft illumination in the hollows of its ears and nose, and illuminating the veins beneath its rocky skin in soft patterns of light.
This was all much as she remembered it. What was different, however, were the shadows.
Around Koid and its herd, shadows swirled. In Imogen’s improved dark-vision, she could tell that they were more than miasma; rather, each one bore the faint outline of a beast. As she swept her head about the cave in alarm, she realized that there were hundreds of them here. Many of them were still also, pressed up against the sleeping Primal.
The witch lacked the power to Semble, and as such she could not hope to determine what the shadow beasts were doing here, but she did not like it. Vonaiad Koid was bad enough as it was, a monstrous titan of fire and agony and misery. The thought of something like that becoming corrupted…
It didn’t bear thinking about. Still, to her eyes, it didn’t seem like they were doing anything more than resting. Anyway, that wasn’t why she was there.
Imogen drifted slowly down from the cavern wall and invoked her rune, shifting rapidly into the form of one of the shadow-cats of the south, but mixed with the totem of the domestic housecat to produce a tiny chimera. The small black Kittengen slunk through the shadows, beneath the notice of the slumbering fire-antelope and the miasmic shadowbeasts alike, slipping carefully underneath them and towards the great Primal’s resting place.
According to the legends of Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv, when Koid had first come to the lowlands, it had fled from a greater primal than itself, retreating to lick its wounds and try to heal over the aeons. Yet it found the lowlands flooded, rainy, and infused with the spirit of dead Gihah- agony to the being of proud fire. It had lowered its horns into the earth and ripped it apart, tearing out the world’s blood to build itself a shelter against the stinging rains and raging waters.
Doubtless embellished. Imogen didn’t think anyone had actually been around to see this happen, and it all had the cadence of myth. But she did believe that Koid had summoned the magma, and that meant…
Kittygen Ward reached the flesh of the sleeping Koid and slipped once more into astral form, squeezing between the walls of the world to avoid touching the Primal and arousing its ire. She sneaked into the caldera in which it slept until she found a sufficient hollow- and the treasure she sought.
Koidhouo’uv had been torn from the earth long ago, and the rocks had cooled over the centuries. But there, in the Primal’s own bed, the aether of fire had been trapped. Veins of glowing red-hot stone ran underneath Koid’s resting place, echoes of the ancient catastrophe which had raised this mountain.
These were veins of unprocessed dragonshard, and hot enough to sear through flesh- even if Imogen had the time or inclination to bore through solid rock to get them, she lacked the expertise to render them into the prepared gemstones which sometimes made their way to market. Perhaps if Koid were slain, a team of miners would find the task sufficiently rewarding. She had other ideas.
Careful not to even brush Koid’s stoney hide (for any contact might let it sense her own fire), Kittygen focused on yet another magic, purple eyes aglow with aether. The Pact dagger which she had bound in Drathera a week prior materialized in the air above the obsidian and magmatyte, gleaming in the wan light.
Imogen wished she could do this in her own form–this was going to be hard enough without being distracted by the senses and instincts of the cat–but there was nothing for it but to proceed telekinetically. She cocked her feline head, and the dagger rotated in the cramped space beneath Koid, until the pommel was facing the ground. Then she slowly, painstakingly, began to unweave it.
Once the dagger was fully intangible, she lowered it into the vein of Magmatyte, focused absolutely upon remolding it. She began the process of rematerializing it within the earth, drawing the magical gemstone surrounding the dagger into its core.
This was the practice of Transmutation, which every competent Reaver knew how to perform. It was the mark of a master, however, to work a dragonshard into a pact weapon, for it required the mage to interweave alien aether with the very substance of their soul and sublimate it. If even a single mistake were made, the Pact weapon might very well burn its way out of Imogen’s soul, leaving a charred wound in her being.
Thankfully, Imogen Ward was a master, and she’d done this twice before. It had been easier, admittedly, when the dragonshards in question were prepared and worked and processed, but the basic principles were the same. She simply drew the gemstone out of the ground and into her slowly-reforming blade, taking in as much of the raw dragonstone as she thought she could safely handle. Her Pact dagger reformed, but through it now rain veins of dull red light, where the heat trapped within the crystalline core shone through the steel.
Once she’d completed the Transmutation to her own satisfaction, Kittygen wasted no further time, but mewled at the spatial barriers surrounding herself. Reality shattered once more, and she hopped lightly through it, letting her newly-augmented dagger follow through the rapidly-disintegrating portals through Slipspace behind her. Outside Koidhouo’uv, she reclaimed her albatross shape and left the fire-forest, her dagger trailing through the air behind her.
Now that the dagger contained new material, new experience, and a heaping fistfull of magmatic aether, the process of rejoining was going to be… difficult. She didn’t intend to dematerialize the thing and let it back into her soul until she was back in Gihah and could jump in the lake if she happened to catch on fire.
Imogen Ward crawled out of the lake at the center of Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv, naked and steaming. She had absolutely caught on fire.
The witch stayed in Gihah for three more nights, though she probably should have left the next day. The people there were friends, now, and the village as bright and comfortable. Still, duty called.
She contemplated the idea of simply heading back east once she left the village, but Imogen was a professional, and a professional always had a backup plan to hand. If this did not work, if her spell failed, she would need something to fall back on. A force powerful and capable enough to oppose a Primal.
Thus, she set off from the village and into the hills above the falls, away from the fire-swamp and towards the ancient, ruined temple surrounded by the strange golden-canopied trees. It was a serene spot, even in the ruddy darkness of the Great Eclipse. Perhaps the spirits which had sanctified it long ago lingered yet.
The witch walked into the empty temple and bowed, though not to whichever forgotten god it was meant to honor.
”Good morning, Halftail.”
~ In Cradle Of Earth Is All Metal First Made ~
It had been more than a year since Imogen Ward had last visited the village, and she was heartened to see that Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv was doing well.
She’d left in a state, having just aided them in unfreezing the reservoir surrounded by the village, making a mad dash for Drathera in the wake of the chaos storms. Then, the trees had been afflicted with patches of frost, and many of the houses built around the great central falls were discolored by brushes with the wild mists.
Now, however, things seemed almost exactly as they had when she’d first journeyed here… with one major exception. The sky.
Somehow, she’d almost gotten used to the absence of day and the constant red glow of the Great Eclipse in her day-to-day life, but the moment of seeing the village highlighted against the red moon, its roofs rising above the ruddy spray somehow brought the comparison to the front of her mind.
The thought sent a wave of sadness and ennui through her, but there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. She set off into the village.
~~~
She wasn’t greeted in Gihah with raucous shouts of joy or anything, but the people of the village were pretty spread out. The ones who were close enough to Chief Oping’s house, either as residents or simply on business, did actually cheer a little to see her. They waved, or ran over to say hello, to ask questions about where she’d been and what she’d been doing.
Hello, she told many people in many different words, I’m doing well, yes, it’s good to see you too. I’m on my way to see the Chief. I’m just here to say hi, I was just in the area and wanted to stop in.
They’d had word from Drathera by now, of course; Gihah was seldom the first village in Ecith to get news, but a year was enough time to have been visited by members of the Shield Legion multiple times. It had been enough of a shock when the Dread Mists had rolled through their own village, had nearly ended their centuries-long stalemate with the fire mountain in tragedy. To hear it was nation-wide…
Worldwide. she corrected a dozen different people, Everywhere was consumed with chaos, and then the darkness came….
It wasn’t until, at the last, she reached Chief Oping that she learned something new.
“The Great Eclipse…” he told her, after they’d embraced and he’d invited her inside to sit down, “...it hasn’t been so bad here. The fish remain in the lake and the rivers. The cider has been harder to make, though. We’ve noticed the trees have fruited less.”
It was a dire statement. Ecith was, agriculturally speaking, a land of abundant blessing. The soils inspired plants to grow huge, of course, but also to grow quickly. When she was here last, she’d been informed that they did not find it that unusual to conduct three or four harvests in a single year. This year? Barely one.
“Some of our hunters have seen the void creatures.” he acknowledged, “And the legionnaires speak of them. But they do not come into the village. They seem drawn west, away from the water. Perhaps Gihah’s spirit protects us?”
Imogen did not think it likely. The monsters feared nothing but sunlight, and while the village’s aquamancy was formidable she saw no particular reason that the creatures would be vulnerable to it.
”I wish we knew the cause.” the witch lamented.
“We do,” responded the Chief, raising a brow, “It is obvious. The god of shadows is ascendant, and this is his coronation. In the time of ascent, it is natural for the order of things to be upended. But as the darkness passes after the fire-mount erupts, so too must order reassert itself.”
”I… see.” Imogen responded. It was a hopeful idea, and one with comprehensible logic. ”Then you believe we will be alright?”
“I did not say that. The time which is a blink of an eye to the gods is time enough for the world to starve. Let us talk of lighter things. You say you are visiting because you are in the area? Where are you headed?”
”First, to Koidhouo’uv. And then… there is one other friend I need to speak to. Just in case.”
~ And Such Is The Cradle, Then Such Is The Grave ~
Imogen Ward approached Koidhouo’uv for a second time, though with a different set of companions.
Where previously she’d taken the network of latticed streams and creeks which criss-crossed the fire-swamp, this time she simply approached from the air. It offered her much less in the way of camouflage against the Primal’s supernal senses, but she knew now that Koid did not wake easily, and she suspected that this unnatural Frost would have weakened the fire primal’s own power. She was quite confident that she could enter the mountain’s caverns and leave before ever it rose to chase, at least as long as no fucking ghosts decided to rouse it.
So she soared now above the scorched trees which stood sentinel over the banished Primal’s lands, her shadow flickering over fire-fungus and grazing Koidspawn below.
Koidhouo’uv was a squat dome of a mountain, grey and black-veined and oddly dreary in the otherwise-verdant fire-swamp. It was less a mountain than a scab, a great oversized mound of dried world-blood, drawn from the living stone below to shield its slumbering master from the acrid tears of the sky.
From her prior visit, Imogen knew well that the mound was honeycombed with tunnels and caverns, both natural cracks created as the lava cooled and hardened and larger tunnels bored out of the mountain by the primal and his herds. With a little time and effort, she could have pinpointed the vent she’d entered last time in lemur-form and scampered through those caverns until she found the fire at its heart.
But her powers had grown since the last visit. Not enough that she intended to challenge Koidhouo’uv’s master–not yet–but enough to let her skip the interminable dark halls within. Anyway, she didn’t intend to dwadle here. Even if Koid was sleeping, it was a place of anger and pain, compounded for Gods-knew how long, and she wasn’t interested in an extended stay.
As the albatross flew above the squat mountain, she focused her power, taking hold of the veil between worlds. She dove for the center of the dome; not a fast, vertical, dramatic dive like a falcon might, but more of a steep incline, for a seabird’s wings were not really meant for more. The rocks rose up to meet her…
And then seemed to shatter.
Imogen’s magic punched through space, and the air fell away like glass, revealing slipspace beyond. The shards reformed as she slipped quietly through, reality patching itself together behind her as she navigated briefly through the unceasing nowhere which underlaid all reality.
Then she punched through again, the slipspace shattering to reveal a hole into the dark cavern beyond. The albatross flew in silently, flapping only twice to slow her momentum.
This was the cave at the heart of Koidhouo’uv, a huge, artificial cavern the size of Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv itself. The ground below (for it had once been the surface, before Koid pulled up the dome over itself) was covered in rubble and shrouded in shadow.
Imogen glided (glode?) silently to a perch on a nearby wall and reconfigured her eyes, blinking rapidly as she adjusted them before assessing the cave.
The last time she’d been here, the witch had worn the form of a lemur, insufficiently comfortable with the power of Animus to do anything more. Now, however, myriad possibilities were open to her. A few minutes of experimentation produced a chimeric blend of cat and eagle eye which allowed her to comfortably take in the shadowy cavern in great detail.
The dark cavern floor was, as she’d expected, dotted with the forms of the Koid’s herd. They were strange creatures, like dark antelope, though somewhat too bulky for the breed, and even asleep they glowed with barely-contained fire. They were, in fact, a lot like the creatures of Southern Ecith in that way, corrupted with elementalism.
Most of them slumbered in groups in the open, obeying some ancient instinct to congregate. The largest, however, slept near the center. And there, in the center, was Koid itself.
The Vonaiad Koid was enormous, larger by far than the ancient hydra she’d slain months prior, second only to the great dragon Exathun in her memory- and even then, a close second. Its skin was black, and she was sure that it was literally made of obsidian, but even asleep, lava dripped from its enormous eyes, providing soft illumination in the hollows of its ears and nose, and illuminating the veins beneath its rocky skin in soft patterns of light.
This was all much as she remembered it. What was different, however, were the shadows.
Around Koid and its herd, shadows swirled. In Imogen’s improved dark-vision, she could tell that they were more than miasma; rather, each one bore the faint outline of a beast. As she swept her head about the cave in alarm, she realized that there were hundreds of them here. Many of them were still also, pressed up against the sleeping Primal.
The witch lacked the power to Semble, and as such she could not hope to determine what the shadow beasts were doing here, but she did not like it. Vonaiad Koid was bad enough as it was, a monstrous titan of fire and agony and misery. The thought of something like that becoming corrupted…
It didn’t bear thinking about. Still, to her eyes, it didn’t seem like they were doing anything more than resting. Anyway, that wasn’t why she was there.
Imogen drifted slowly down from the cavern wall and invoked her rune, shifting rapidly into the form of one of the shadow-cats of the south, but mixed with the totem of the domestic housecat to produce a tiny chimera. The small black Kittengen slunk through the shadows, beneath the notice of the slumbering fire-antelope and the miasmic shadowbeasts alike, slipping carefully underneath them and towards the great Primal’s resting place.
According to the legends of Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv, when Koid had first come to the lowlands, it had fled from a greater primal than itself, retreating to lick its wounds and try to heal over the aeons. Yet it found the lowlands flooded, rainy, and infused with the spirit of dead Gihah- agony to the being of proud fire. It had lowered its horns into the earth and ripped it apart, tearing out the world’s blood to build itself a shelter against the stinging rains and raging waters.
Doubtless embellished. Imogen didn’t think anyone had actually been around to see this happen, and it all had the cadence of myth. But she did believe that Koid had summoned the magma, and that meant…
Kittygen Ward reached the flesh of the sleeping Koid and slipped once more into astral form, squeezing between the walls of the world to avoid touching the Primal and arousing its ire. She sneaked into the caldera in which it slept until she found a sufficient hollow- and the treasure she sought.
Koidhouo’uv had been torn from the earth long ago, and the rocks had cooled over the centuries. But there, in the Primal’s own bed, the aether of fire had been trapped. Veins of glowing red-hot stone ran underneath Koid’s resting place, echoes of the ancient catastrophe which had raised this mountain.
These were veins of unprocessed dragonshard, and hot enough to sear through flesh- even if Imogen had the time or inclination to bore through solid rock to get them, she lacked the expertise to render them into the prepared gemstones which sometimes made their way to market. Perhaps if Koid were slain, a team of miners would find the task sufficiently rewarding. She had other ideas.
Careful not to even brush Koid’s stoney hide (for any contact might let it sense her own fire), Kittygen focused on yet another magic, purple eyes aglow with aether. The Pact dagger which she had bound in Drathera a week prior materialized in the air above the obsidian and magmatyte, gleaming in the wan light.
Imogen wished she could do this in her own form–this was going to be hard enough without being distracted by the senses and instincts of the cat–but there was nothing for it but to proceed telekinetically. She cocked her feline head, and the dagger rotated in the cramped space beneath Koid, until the pommel was facing the ground. Then she slowly, painstakingly, began to unweave it.
Once the dagger was fully intangible, she lowered it into the vein of Magmatyte, focused absolutely upon remolding it. She began the process of rematerializing it within the earth, drawing the magical gemstone surrounding the dagger into its core.
This was the practice of Transmutation, which every competent Reaver knew how to perform. It was the mark of a master, however, to work a dragonshard into a pact weapon, for it required the mage to interweave alien aether with the very substance of their soul and sublimate it. If even a single mistake were made, the Pact weapon might very well burn its way out of Imogen’s soul, leaving a charred wound in her being.
Thankfully, Imogen Ward was a master, and she’d done this twice before. It had been easier, admittedly, when the dragonshards in question were prepared and worked and processed, but the basic principles were the same. She simply drew the gemstone out of the ground and into her slowly-reforming blade, taking in as much of the raw dragonstone as she thought she could safely handle. Her Pact dagger reformed, but through it now rain veins of dull red light, where the heat trapped within the crystalline core shone through the steel.
Once she’d completed the Transmutation to her own satisfaction, Kittygen wasted no further time, but mewled at the spatial barriers surrounding herself. Reality shattered once more, and she hopped lightly through it, letting her newly-augmented dagger follow through the rapidly-disintegrating portals through Slipspace behind her. Outside Koidhouo’uv, she reclaimed her albatross shape and left the fire-forest, her dagger trailing through the air behind her.
Now that the dagger contained new material, new experience, and a heaping fistfull of magmatic aether, the process of rejoining was going to be… difficult. She didn’t intend to dematerialize the thing and let it back into her soul until she was back in Gihah and could jump in the lake if she happened to catch on fire.
~~~
Imogen Ward crawled out of the lake at the center of Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv, naked and steaming. She had absolutely caught on fire.
~~~
The witch stayed in Gihah for three more nights, though she probably should have left the next day. The people there were friends, now, and the village as bright and comfortable. Still, duty called.
She contemplated the idea of simply heading back east once she left the village, but Imogen was a professional, and a professional always had a backup plan to hand. If this did not work, if her spell failed, she would need something to fall back on. A force powerful and capable enough to oppose a Primal.
Thus, she set off from the village and into the hills above the falls, away from the fire-swamp and towards the ancient, ruined temple surrounded by the strange golden-canopied trees. It was a serene spot, even in the ruddy darkness of the Great Eclipse. Perhaps the spirits which had sanctified it long ago lingered yet.
The witch walked into the empty temple and bowed, though not to whichever forgotten god it was meant to honor.
”Good morning, Halftail.”
