Searing 68, 124
She opened her eyes no more rested than the moment she’d closed them, two days prior.
That was the nature of the disease. Sleep was meant to help the body recover, recuperate, rebuild, but it could not do so when every mote of energy was stolen from her cells the moment it was generated.
Back on Ailos, the drain had been so minor that she wouldn’t have noticed it for weeks, had it not been for the initial catastrophe in waking Deravaecia. Over time, the Aether Creep’s effect had doubled, and redoubled, and by now it was pulling at her always, stealing away more power every instant than she could possibly respire by herself. Teas infused with luminous dragonshards had helped at first, and then she’d resorted to just draining them entirely of power. But that had ceased to be enough months ago.
Now, it was only thanks to a trick that she survived at all. By dint of Animus, Imogen embedded a hydra’s gallstone between her ribs, below her heart, and used it to fuel the necessary functions of the body even as her natural aether became uselessly thin. It had worked well for a time, but she was no centuries-old monster; the lifeforce she’d secreted away in the stone was beginning to run out.
Once it did, she would simply never wake. The Creep would take her, body and soul.
The witch focused, reconnecting her spirit with the Gallstone and pulling more power from its depleted depths. The pallor of her skin grew gradually brighter, emaciated muscles filling out. After a moment, she felt strong enough to sit upright.
Kitty stood, rising abruptly from the corner of the Expedition tent, and padded over to lick Imogen’s face. She reached up, joints aching from their sudden revitalization, and scratched at his nose. He was starting to get pretty big.
"I’m out of time to waste.” she told her familiar, "I’ll find answers in Kythera today, or I won’t find them at all.”
~~~
By the time Imogen Ward reached the outskirts of Kythera, she had used the last of her stones from Ailos to summon her sword and transmute it to the poisonous copper. Through slumber, she’d heard enough from the Major and Ooklo’s worried discussion to suspect that the city was entirely infested with the Queen’s magic- but her fight to free the Seasons a year prior had taught her much and more about how to deal with spores.
Indeed, as she passed, she observed the yellow dust clinging to the nearby trees brown and clump. If she’d time to spare, she could have stood there until the trees themselves blackened- but this was not her aim, and her power dwindled by the instant. She could only hope her gambit would suffice to keep the Queen’s minion’s distracted, and leave her with only microscopic threats.
This close to the shattered walls of Kythera, it was impossible to see any large-scale changes within the legion of plants which manned the streets and crenelations; but the witch trusted her instincts on this matter. If all went well, the Queen’s private army of wooden soldiers would have been diverted to deal with the unexpected territorial dispute. Between that and the field of subtle death generated by Imogen’s magic…
She pressed on, moving with all the speed she could coax out of her aching body. Slipping into the city through one of the fissures torn open in the walls by the rampaging plantlife, Imogen clambered over broken masonry, squeezing past thorn-bedecked vines and underneath statues of Orkhan scholars and philosophers rendered faceless by the encroaching flora.
The flowers festooning the plants wilted as she passed, the blooms darkening and desiccating around the edges. She wondered if the Queen could feel that, in some way. Of all the Primals of Ecith, the Queen of Kythera was perhaps the most mysterious. Owing to the recency of its origins, there were no myths containing crumbs of truth, like those which had guided her against Kegumu Rekaka in her battle a year past. No, there were only rumors and scattered reports from those members of the Shield Legion who had actually survived the battles in the Imperial Marches.
Still, she put all of that out of her mind. It didn’t matter, truly, whether the Queen knew she was here, as long as the primal was properly distracted by the Silent Fisher’s sudden appearance. All she needed was a scant few hours to get in, find the estate from which her grandmother had come, find her answers, and get out.
Of course, she didn’t actually know where that estate was… but that wasn’t going to stop her, either. As she finished clearing Kythera’s boundary wall and stumbled into the wreckage of the first, outermost street, she lifted her copper-infused Pact sword and closed her eyes. The color and texture of the weapon shifted as though it were being seen through a heat distortion, discorporating beneath the adamant strength of Imogen’s will. This sort of magic cost virtually nothing in terms of aether, which was very lucky since that was roughly everything she could afford to spend.
As the sword became fully incorporeal, the Sunsinger raised her left hand, now bedecked with a silver ring, inset with a large, perfect opal. Slowly, carefully, the ork brought the ring up to the tip of the Pact weapon and touched them gently together.
Within the hour, despite her poor map and slow going, Imogen found herself in the depths of what had once been Kythera’s production district. The ruins of alchemy labs and broken greenhouses produced plants with bright and eye-catching features; purple vines sporting iridescent pink leaves, mushrooms and red moss draped over strange silvery stones, and even bioluminescent trees poking sideways through holes in the walls. It was probably some biologist’s dream, but the witch had always been more interested in fauna. She passed by those haunts with nary a moment for further inspection.
Less than an hour after entering the city, the witch located her target. It was an estate in the style of a large townhouse, but set apart from its neighbors by now-spoilt beds of herbs which must have taken up a full acre in the middle of a city district. It was not spectacular in the fashion of a palace, but growing up in Zaichaer had taught Imogen that this much space in a packed metropolis came at some kind of premium.
Imogen fancied for a moment that she could feel a pull towards this particular ruin within her heart, in some ancestral chamber- but she quickly realized that this was actually still coming from the ring. Slowly, she withdrew her sword, breathing deeply as the confusing sense of history came to an end and she found herself standing in the middle of a deserted street, staring at a ruined house.
"Nice place.” she commented to nobody, and was surprised to find it coming out in a raspy whisper. It seemed that little act of psychometry, combined with a short walk, had taken a toll on her. Time was slipping rapidly by.
~~~
The interior of the modest manor was overgrown, but not to the extent of the exterior. She’d imagined that the buildings of Kythera must be, one and all, choked with vines throughout, but on reflection it made sense that those rooms without ready access to sunlight should remain clear. In retrospect, then, it was unfortunate that the architects of Kythera had prioritized each room’s access to sunlight, with prominent windows and broken skylights much in evidence and each encouraging proliferation of the plants.
It would have been nice to linger in the rooms, to examine the broken furniture and shattered portraiture for clues about her grandmother’s family. Perhaps she would have time to return and do just that, some day. For now, she was looking for an alchemist’s workshop.
This wasn’t too hard to find. In her experience, mages liked to build up and put their libraries and places of power closer to the heavens, possibly because they liked the view. Alchemists, on the other hand, seemed to like to keep things underground, where the temperature could be stabilized and the humidity accounted for. Plus, she imagined, it was better for something to explode underground than high above it.
The basement of the townhouse did, indeed, show all the signs of having once served as an alchemist’s atelier- but it had been thoroughly brutalized by the Queen. Roots penetrated every corner of the basement, curling back down to the shattered and overturned tables on which experimental shoots had once flourished. Bookshelves had ruptured as the plantlife grew through them, seeking to build connections between this room and the outside world, and certainly none of the cabinets of chemical distillates had been spared. She doubted very much that an alchemist could make soap in these conditions, let alone try to recreate any of their works.
But this sight did not dishearten her. She moved through the rubble, sliding over the roots and around overturned tables, seeking…
Imogen let out a low whistle as she examined the door. She couldn’t make hide nor hair of the decorations. Probably they represented some manner of myth endemic to Kythera, some sort of legend in Ecith she’d never heard of. It didn’t matter. The runes carved into the door were clear enough about its purpose.
"Hermetically sealed.” the witch noted with a bit of satisfaction, "That’ll be where they kept… whatever.”
Without further ado, Imogen raised the opal ring to the door. It loosened with a barely-audible click.
~~~
The atmosphere beyond the seal was at once distinct from the airs of Kythera. No scents of wet vine, no pollen, nor the scents of a thousand flowers throughout. Only darkness and the musk of stale air and paper greeted her nose.
As Imogen walked through the doorway, she could feel the enchantments stripping grime and blackened pollen off her skin. Whatever spell her family had relied upon to secure the atelier, it remained vigorous. It could only be a dragonshard array, buried somewhere within the complex- nothing else would have held up so well after decades of disuse.
She stalked into the dark chamber, eyes cutting easily through the gloom. These were not experimental chambers, per se, but a workshop for the family’s alchemists. Occult components lined cabinets across the walls- scales, gems, vials of deep inky distillate, covered in a patina of dust. There were books, too, scrolls and tablets, arranged carefully in ancient hardwood bureaus.
"Everything’s upright.” the Ork said, quietly, scratching at her cheek. Odd. Even if the workshop had sufficient wards to keep out the aggressive plantlife, surely the shifting of those roots should have dislodged some stuff? Unless it were likewise warded against tectonic shifts; possible, but it would have taken a lot of power.
Imogen spent a few minutes wandering the room, opening the cabinets and trying to ascertain what the assembled reagents even were. Powdered bones, dried skins, preserved flowers with names she couldn’t even pronounce… probably all of great interest to some scholar, but not so much to her. She paused as she passed an egg the size of her fist, drawing idly in the dust upon its shell with one finger. Doubtful that it was going to hatch after twenty years, whatever it was.
Her frustration slowly grew as she poked about uselessly through the fallow inheritance of her vanished family. This was exactly what she’d warned Noko about! What was she meant to do with all this shit?
Annoyance mounting, Imogen’s eye was caught by a decoration- a wall covered in portraits. The witch drew close to the images, brushing them off gently with a sleeve to try to get a better look at them. There were a half-dozen different people pictured there, violet-eyed and opal-scaled as she was. They did, she had to admit, look pretty good.
More to the point, they taught her something. This place had been the sanctum for a very, very small number of people. If she could find something of one of them, a remnant…
Of course. She already had it. If the ring was the key into this atelier, then everyone who had ever studied here must have worn it. She just needed to inspect its history… more deeply.
Imogen pulled the ring gently from her finger and placed it on a hardwood desk, positioning herself just behind it. She put both hands on the hilt of her sword, closing her eyes to focus on it, changing it, reshaping its substance until it was purely a tool of spirit. The copper metal melted away, and the sword became entirely translucent.
Gingerly, she lowered the transparent blade into the ring- and stabbed it into the fabric of history.
The monster stepped out of the jungle in total silence.
That silence was not limited to the beast’s own movements- where it went, the chatter of birds died, monkeys hid, insects stilled. Even the echoes of life too far distant to sense the creature seemed muted, the colors of the world about it dim and sullen.
Although it had suffered innumerable setbacks, the monster felt no hint of discouragement. That was not within its nature. It knew only its nature, and every thing in the world softer than its own spirit had to give way to the fact of that nature. And that nature led it inexorably towards prey.
The quarry had left the protection of the ancient dragon’s wings, but hidden itself behind another barrier- a great verdant ground of stones and blooms. The monster could sense the power sleeping in those ruins; or rather, no, not sleeping. It had encountered Primals before, it knew that to enter would mean to fight, to struggle and to war. These were not things the monster sought.
But they would not suffice to turn it away, either.
She opened her eyes no more rested than the moment she’d closed them, two days prior.
That was the nature of the disease. Sleep was meant to help the body recover, recuperate, rebuild, but it could not do so when every mote of energy was stolen from her cells the moment it was generated.
Back on Ailos, the drain had been so minor that she wouldn’t have noticed it for weeks, had it not been for the initial catastrophe in waking Deravaecia. Over time, the Aether Creep’s effect had doubled, and redoubled, and by now it was pulling at her always, stealing away more power every instant than she could possibly respire by herself. Teas infused with luminous dragonshards had helped at first, and then she’d resorted to just draining them entirely of power. But that had ceased to be enough months ago.
Now, it was only thanks to a trick that she survived at all. By dint of Animus, Imogen embedded a hydra’s gallstone between her ribs, below her heart, and used it to fuel the necessary functions of the body even as her natural aether became uselessly thin. It had worked well for a time, but she was no centuries-old monster; the lifeforce she’d secreted away in the stone was beginning to run out.
Once it did, she would simply never wake. The Creep would take her, body and soul.
The witch focused, reconnecting her spirit with the Gallstone and pulling more power from its depleted depths. The pallor of her skin grew gradually brighter, emaciated muscles filling out. After a moment, she felt strong enough to sit upright.
Kitty stood, rising abruptly from the corner of the Expedition tent, and padded over to lick Imogen’s face. She reached up, joints aching from their sudden revitalization, and scratched at his nose. He was starting to get pretty big.
"I’m out of time to waste.” she told her familiar, "I’ll find answers in Kythera today, or I won’t find them at all.”
~~~
By the time Imogen Ward reached the outskirts of Kythera, she had used the last of her stones from Ailos to summon her sword and transmute it to the poisonous copper. Through slumber, she’d heard enough from the Major and Ooklo’s worried discussion to suspect that the city was entirely infested with the Queen’s magic- but her fight to free the Seasons a year prior had taught her much and more about how to deal with spores.
Indeed, as she passed, she observed the yellow dust clinging to the nearby trees brown and clump. If she’d time to spare, she could have stood there until the trees themselves blackened- but this was not her aim, and her power dwindled by the instant. She could only hope her gambit would suffice to keep the Queen’s minion’s distracted, and leave her with only microscopic threats.
This close to the shattered walls of Kythera, it was impossible to see any large-scale changes within the legion of plants which manned the streets and crenelations; but the witch trusted her instincts on this matter. If all went well, the Queen’s private army of wooden soldiers would have been diverted to deal with the unexpected territorial dispute. Between that and the field of subtle death generated by Imogen’s magic…
She pressed on, moving with all the speed she could coax out of her aching body. Slipping into the city through one of the fissures torn open in the walls by the rampaging plantlife, Imogen clambered over broken masonry, squeezing past thorn-bedecked vines and underneath statues of Orkhan scholars and philosophers rendered faceless by the encroaching flora.
The flowers festooning the plants wilted as she passed, the blooms darkening and desiccating around the edges. She wondered if the Queen could feel that, in some way. Of all the Primals of Ecith, the Queen of Kythera was perhaps the most mysterious. Owing to the recency of its origins, there were no myths containing crumbs of truth, like those which had guided her against Kegumu Rekaka in her battle a year past. No, there were only rumors and scattered reports from those members of the Shield Legion who had actually survived the battles in the Imperial Marches.
Still, she put all of that out of her mind. It didn’t matter, truly, whether the Queen knew she was here, as long as the primal was properly distracted by the Silent Fisher’s sudden appearance. All she needed was a scant few hours to get in, find the estate from which her grandmother had come, find her answers, and get out.
Of course, she didn’t actually know where that estate was… but that wasn’t going to stop her, either. As she finished clearing Kythera’s boundary wall and stumbled into the wreckage of the first, outermost street, she lifted her copper-infused Pact sword and closed her eyes. The color and texture of the weapon shifted as though it were being seen through a heat distortion, discorporating beneath the adamant strength of Imogen’s will. This sort of magic cost virtually nothing in terms of aether, which was very lucky since that was roughly everything she could afford to spend.
As the sword became fully incorporeal, the Sunsinger raised her left hand, now bedecked with a silver ring, inset with a large, perfect opal. Slowly, carefully, the ork brought the ring up to the tip of the Pact weapon and touched them gently together.
At once, Imogen’s mind flooded with memories. Not memories of any one person, but of the ring itself. It had spent long years traveling these streets–centuries, maybe, though she couldn’t really tell–and the imprint of its passage remained in the depths of the stone and metal. By melding a bit of her soul and the substance of the ring, she could extract that information in bits and pieces, flashes of knowledge and raw inspiration.
The witch felt the course the ring had taken in its countless trips through the city, less a mental map and more a weight within her spirit which pulled more southwest than anywhere else. If she had the aether, she might have tried using her Traversion to open a portal there at once. She didn’t. She was just going to have to walk.
The real struggle, as it turned out, wasn’t finding the past from the substance of the ring- it was turning it out. Her eyes deceived her as she pressed cautiously through the streets, the strong memory within the ring battling her senses as she tried to avoid tripping over fallen pillars or into potholes caused by the shifting roots omnipresent below Kythera.
Imogen moved through the city in a haze, trying to juggle the sights and sounds of the present with the hazy aura of the past, all the while feeling the burning fever of her ailment growing. A stumble there- a fall there, all the while being careful to ensure that her sword and ring remained in a state of intersect. If they moved apart… at best, she would lose the sense of past she was using as a map. At worst, she might accidentally tear the ring apart.
If she’d been attacked during this delirium, it would have gone poorly. Thankfully, it seemed her gambit was paying off. She saw none of the Queen’s soldiers, humanoid or otherwise, as she made her way deeper into the city. She fancied, once or twice, that she could hear bangs and crashes from falling stonework and splintering wood, perhaps from a distant battle.
She pressed on.
Within the hour, despite her poor map and slow going, Imogen found herself in the depths of what had once been Kythera’s production district. The ruins of alchemy labs and broken greenhouses produced plants with bright and eye-catching features; purple vines sporting iridescent pink leaves, mushrooms and red moss draped over strange silvery stones, and even bioluminescent trees poking sideways through holes in the walls. It was probably some biologist’s dream, but the witch had always been more interested in fauna. She passed by those haunts with nary a moment for further inspection.
Less than an hour after entering the city, the witch located her target. It was an estate in the style of a large townhouse, but set apart from its neighbors by now-spoilt beds of herbs which must have taken up a full acre in the middle of a city district. It was not spectacular in the fashion of a palace, but growing up in Zaichaer had taught Imogen that this much space in a packed metropolis came at some kind of premium.
Imogen fancied for a moment that she could feel a pull towards this particular ruin within her heart, in some ancestral chamber- but she quickly realized that this was actually still coming from the ring. Slowly, she withdrew her sword, breathing deeply as the confusing sense of history came to an end and she found herself standing in the middle of a deserted street, staring at a ruined house.
"Nice place.” she commented to nobody, and was surprised to find it coming out in a raspy whisper. It seemed that little act of psychometry, combined with a short walk, had taken a toll on her. Time was slipping rapidly by.
~~~
The interior of the modest manor was overgrown, but not to the extent of the exterior. She’d imagined that the buildings of Kythera must be, one and all, choked with vines throughout, but on reflection it made sense that those rooms without ready access to sunlight should remain clear. In retrospect, then, it was unfortunate that the architects of Kythera had prioritized each room’s access to sunlight, with prominent windows and broken skylights much in evidence and each encouraging proliferation of the plants.
It would have been nice to linger in the rooms, to examine the broken furniture and shattered portraiture for clues about her grandmother’s family. Perhaps she would have time to return and do just that, some day. For now, she was looking for an alchemist’s workshop.
This wasn’t too hard to find. In her experience, mages liked to build up and put their libraries and places of power closer to the heavens, possibly because they liked the view. Alchemists, on the other hand, seemed to like to keep things underground, where the temperature could be stabilized and the humidity accounted for. Plus, she imagined, it was better for something to explode underground than high above it.
The basement of the townhouse did, indeed, show all the signs of having once served as an alchemist’s atelier- but it had been thoroughly brutalized by the Queen. Roots penetrated every corner of the basement, curling back down to the shattered and overturned tables on which experimental shoots had once flourished. Bookshelves had ruptured as the plantlife grew through them, seeking to build connections between this room and the outside world, and certainly none of the cabinets of chemical distillates had been spared. She doubted very much that an alchemist could make soap in these conditions, let alone try to recreate any of their works.
But this sight did not dishearten her. She moved through the rubble, sliding over the roots and around overturned tables, seeking…
Imogen let out a low whistle as she examined the door. She couldn’t make hide nor hair of the decorations. Probably they represented some manner of myth endemic to Kythera, some sort of legend in Ecith she’d never heard of. It didn’t matter. The runes carved into the door were clear enough about its purpose.
"Hermetically sealed.” the witch noted with a bit of satisfaction, "That’ll be where they kept… whatever.”
Without further ado, Imogen raised the opal ring to the door. It loosened with a barely-audible click.
~~~
”Correct me if I’m wrong.” Imogen said, “But isn’t that a ruin overrun by monsters? You want me to traipse in there? I can hardly summon the strength to Blink, and you think I ought to challenge another Primal?”
“No, I do not want you to go to Kythera.” responded the young Seeress, temper flaring, “But I told you what the future holds. If you want to survive, you will find your answer with your ancestors.”
Silence settled over the room. There wasn’t a lot which that could mean. Most of the ancestors Imogen knew about had lived and died in Gihah K'uvfoi'uv Fi'uv, and she knew enough of that village to know that nobody there had any kind of secrets applicable to this case.
But her grandmother… she had come from Kythera, once. She knew that from the Librarians. The family had been famous in the region, both for their unusual looks and for some sort of alchemical, pharmacological expertise. It was a sensible profession in a city which had made its name by growing every type of plant in the world, she supposed.
“And did Galetira give you any other details, maybe?” the witch pressed, “Because I can’t see how I’m going to find an answer wandering through an alchemist’s lab when I don’t know anything about the art myself.”
“The Lady did not conduct this vision, Imogen.” retorted Noko, “But the impression was clear enough. If you go to the place of your ancestors, you will find what you need to survive.”
The atmosphere beyond the seal was at once distinct from the airs of Kythera. No scents of wet vine, no pollen, nor the scents of a thousand flowers throughout. Only darkness and the musk of stale air and paper greeted her nose.
As Imogen walked through the doorway, she could feel the enchantments stripping grime and blackened pollen off her skin. Whatever spell her family had relied upon to secure the atelier, it remained vigorous. It could only be a dragonshard array, buried somewhere within the complex- nothing else would have held up so well after decades of disuse.
She stalked into the dark chamber, eyes cutting easily through the gloom. These were not experimental chambers, per se, but a workshop for the family’s alchemists. Occult components lined cabinets across the walls- scales, gems, vials of deep inky distillate, covered in a patina of dust. There were books, too, scrolls and tablets, arranged carefully in ancient hardwood bureaus.
"Everything’s upright.” the Ork said, quietly, scratching at her cheek. Odd. Even if the workshop had sufficient wards to keep out the aggressive plantlife, surely the shifting of those roots should have dislodged some stuff? Unless it were likewise warded against tectonic shifts; possible, but it would have taken a lot of power.
Imogen spent a few minutes wandering the room, opening the cabinets and trying to ascertain what the assembled reagents even were. Powdered bones, dried skins, preserved flowers with names she couldn’t even pronounce… probably all of great interest to some scholar, but not so much to her. She paused as she passed an egg the size of her fist, drawing idly in the dust upon its shell with one finger. Doubtful that it was going to hatch after twenty years, whatever it was.
Her frustration slowly grew as she poked about uselessly through the fallow inheritance of her vanished family. This was exactly what she’d warned Noko about! What was she meant to do with all this shit?
Annoyance mounting, Imogen’s eye was caught by a decoration- a wall covered in portraits. The witch drew close to the images, brushing them off gently with a sleeve to try to get a better look at them. There were a half-dozen different people pictured there, violet-eyed and opal-scaled as she was. They did, she had to admit, look pretty good.
More to the point, they taught her something. This place had been the sanctum for a very, very small number of people. If she could find something of one of them, a remnant…
Of course. She already had it. If the ring was the key into this atelier, then everyone who had ever studied here must have worn it. She just needed to inspect its history… more deeply.
Imogen pulled the ring gently from her finger and placed it on a hardwood desk, positioning herself just behind it. She put both hands on the hilt of her sword, closing her eyes to focus on it, changing it, reshaping its substance until it was purely a tool of spirit. The copper metal melted away, and the sword became entirely translucent.
Gingerly, she lowered the transparent blade into the ring- and stabbed it into the fabric of history.