Searing 68, 124
Reaving was, in many ways, a justly unpopular form of magic. Sure, it had its obvious uses; you could whistle up a sword when you were otherwise unarmed, or even summon a few to fight on your behalf and take on a squadron by yourself. To someone seeking power for their own defense, however, these must have seemed like bafflingly bad bargains. Kinetics could repel a sword as easily as another sword could, after all, and a kineticist could kill a hundred men in the time a swordsman took to kill one.
In Imogen’s mind, this attitude exhibited a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of Reaving. The reason to teach young mages to Reave was not because the rune itself imbued them with great power, but because it forced them to confront and master themselves, to understand how their own spirits related to the world. To crystalize the distinctions, to train their intentions, and to force them to reconcile themselves with their actions, their actions with the rest of creation.
And then, at the last, to collapse the distinctions when it became useful to do so.
The witch’s sword turned translucent as she raised it, the matter of it falling away so that it was nothing but concept. Her mind was aether made energy, which directed her hand. Her hand was aether spun into flesh, and it grasped the hilt, which was aether crystalized into metal. The hilt held onto the tang and blade, which relapsed into aether in the form of pure spirit- soul, and body, and weapon all formed a gradient encompassing every state of being in the world. But it was all her.
The ring was not. It was also aether, but made manifest so long ago that no member of her race had been alive to see it. It had been mined and forged before the time of her birth, conceived of and worn before her soul was ever spat out of whatever great cosmic machine distributed them. It was not alive, and had no soul, not as such.
As the swordtip entered the ring, the arc of her soul fused with it, and memory flooded through her. She’d dragged vague impressions of the city from it before, the cobwebs of impressions it had gathered from centuries of wear; now she used it as a focus for something much larger, much closer to being alive itself. The long-departed legacy of her grandmother’s family.
Imogen staggered to one knee, her sword falling away from the ring as the world returned to normal about her.
"Damn.” she swore, to the attention of nobody in particular, "That’s useless.”
There was no way to tell for sure, but she thought the lab and the ring had probably been in her grandmother’s family for ten generations or more- and ten generations of lives, even of a single family’s history within a combined space, was simply too much to process. It certainly wouldn’t help her locate any kind of cure.
But it did give her an idea.
The room was lined with curios; trophies, maybe, or perhaps just exotic ingredients the alchemists had collected. Perhaps she could pull something a little more focused from those? If she kept her eyes on the prize, as it were…
The witch stalked over to one end of the room, where the carefully-preserved skeleton of a bird (with six wings?) was pinned to a wall. She breathed in, deeply, and emptied her mind of anything but desire for arcane, alchemical knowledge. Knowledge of cures. Gingerly, she touched the tip of her sword to the fragile skeleton-
Imogen pulled away. She’d had scale rashes from time to time, of course, but she had bigger concerns today. She took a step to the side, raising her transparent blade towards an eye, floating in a jar of amniotic fluid-
"That does sound useful.” Imogen admitted. It wasn’t going to be very helpful to her, though. Especially not while dead. She moved on once more, closing in on the big egg-
Hadn’t done anything, it seemed. The egg was still sitting here, decades later, unhatched. Certainly not alive. Probably for the best, she reckoned.
But she was getting nowhere fast. There were hundreds, if not thousands of these bits and baubles in cabinets and shelves throughout the large chamber. She didn’t have time even to skim them all. She needed something more central, some repository of knowledge. Something like…
…there.
Sitting on a shelf on the south end of the room, inconspicuously conspicuous, was the huge book which had appeared in all three of her visions. It was large, of course, but she thought those three scenes had been generations apart. She knew from experience that even a bulky tome would fill up before then. That meant…
Imogen stepped carefully over a fallen chair and advanced carefully on the thing. It was bound in some kind of lizard-skin leather, and bore no label. She touched it carefully, just in case it began to disintegrate, then more forcefully, rolling it onto its spine. If she was right- yes. There. There were memnosytes sewn into the cover, all the way down the spine. Dozens of the little bastards.
She’d seen the like before- a sort of primitive precursor to the crystal tablets which had become popular in Gelerand, which Carina had spent a baffled night demonstrating to her. These could store a dozen books’ worth of text in the space of a single tome, allowing a virtual library of information to be inscribed within. It was the diary of generations of her ancestors, an entire legacy of alchemists. And this was where she would find her answer.
The witch turned her transparent blade onto its side, resting lightly in her palm, and inserted it delicately between the pages. Light shimmered across the book’s many memnosytes as their powers were invoked, ages of memory building within them. She twisted the hilt, turning her sword like a key-
Imogen found herself fallen on her ass, her pact sword having clattered uselessly to the side. The big book was just sitting there, a little less dusty for her having moved it about.
"WHAT?” the Ork demanded, uselessly, of nobody.
There is no cure.
The voices haunted her, burned into her mind from the exposure with the book. They seemed to follow her as she stumbled, catching herself against the stone wall, and carefully maneuvering down the stairwell.
She’d left the book there. For one, she was too rattled to even think about transporting it right now- but even when she calmed down, she’d realize that she wasn’t really equipped to transport such a valuable artifact to anyone who might have a use for it. SHE certainly wasn’t going to get much more out of centuries of alchemist scribblings.
Imogen had flipped through the thing in disbelief for a few minutes, but even the bits she could actually read (and this was being generous- the Ecithian she’d learned to write was of an entirely different dialect) were incomprehensible as far as she was concerned. She couldn’t have pulled an answer out by reading it, not if she had ten years to study it.
And she didn’t have ten years. She might not have ten days. There is no cure.
"Except there is.” the witch snarled to herself, slowing as she carefully descended further down the dark stone corridor. It wasn’t nearly as clean as it had been in her vision, choked now with fallen masonry and detritus, not to mention vines and roots, but it was still mostly navigable.
Noko had told her that there was a way to cure this, and it rested with her family’s history. Her family had just told her, in no uncertain terms, that they didn’t have it- but that wasn’t her whole lineage, was it? No, there was nothing in her grandmother’s family and nothing in her grandfather’s family… but what about after them?
She needed to get back to the Sunsingers. But she didn’t have time.
Didn’t have time yet.
The foundations of Kythera, back before it had been destroyed by war and the Queen, were in its plants and gardens. Of course, the foundations of Kythera were also literally masonry, for if anyone tried to stack two gardens one atop the other, she doubted it would work well. Plantlife and stone.
And below those? A living stone.
The details about the heart of the city were relatively scarce, but she’d pieced together enough to suspect what lay there, down in the depths, below the gardens and architecture both. Verdantite. One of the rarest and most expensive of all dragonshards, forming only over vast periods of time in the depths of those few forests which still stood after the Sundering. A stone powerful enough to be worth a damn would bankrupt even a mage.
The darkness ahead of Imogen began to lift, the room filling with green light. It was not as bright as it had been in the vision of the egg, but that was no surprise- the room was choked with vines. Not the sort of long-dormant vine which had worked its way into the stonework throughout the city, either; these pulsated with fresh life, with sap and juices.
One of the Queen’s taproots. Imogen thought grimly to herself. This was why every attempt to root out the new Primal had failed. Defeating one of the elemental beasts was one thing, one very, very difficult thing. But how would you contend with one which held an inexhaustible source of power and recovery?
The roots wound around a huge dragonshard. A shard’s size wasn’t always particularly indicative of power, of course, but she could sense the purity of this one from a hundred paces. The room practically buzzed with the life energy it contained. Even after fueling the Queen’s growth for nigh on thirty years, it contained enough raw power to give her pause. Trying to connect to a source of that much life energy… that could kill you stone dead, ironically. Too much of a good thing could be poison, and there was enough of a good thing in that rock to kill a hundred thousand of Imogen Ward.
(She wondered briefly how it had been transported- or had it, at all? Perhaps they built Kythera around this, rather than the other way?)
Thankfully, she didn’t need to touch it- gods knew, that might just waken the Queen, distract her from her battle with the Silent Fisher above. No, she just needed to harness some of the energy it was bleeding off.
Imogen located a patch of stone with the oldest-looking roots on it and cleared them away carefully, trying to tear them as little as possible to avoid the note of the grand power above her. She removed a pouch of Sorcerer’s sand from her coat, and carefully drew a basic circle upon the empty ground.
Then the witch ripped out her heart.
Well, okay, not really. That would have been a bad idea, on account of being instantly fatal. Instead, she pried the Gallstone out of her chest, wincing in agony as the skin which had loosely fused with it tore and bled. Gasping with pain, she placed the stone inside the circle, and waited.
After a moment, the runes of her little circle lit with green fire. It began to slowly draw power into the stone.
The witch couldn’t have said if it were minutes, hours, or days later when her little theft came to an end. Her vision was getting blurry without the Gallstone’s power to regenerate it, but she didn’t dare leave too quickly- after all, what odds were there that she’d ever get back? Still, she was aware that if she nodded off to unconsciousness, she might well just die there, lying on the overgrown stone floor.
And she was in the midst of nodding off when the sudden sound of protesting stone met her ears, somewhere far above her. The sounds of force, violence- though no shouting, nor any other animal noise. It could have been one of the Queen’s servitors, finally making its way down, or perhaps Kegumu Rekaka itself.
Imogen didn’t bother to find out. With a sudden burst of strength, she grabbed the Gallstone from the circle, noting its new lustre with some hope. She hesitated, wondering if she should slam it back into her chest right away- but good sense intervened. If pain or some other complication should make her pass out and either of the Primals caught up to her here, she was dead.
Instead, she called out to the distant light of Ailos, and let it silently draw her away, through stone and sea and endless miles. Sunlight bathed the chamber, momentarily overpowering the verdure of the heart, and then vanished, leaving absolutely nothing behind.
In Imogen’s mind, this attitude exhibited a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of Reaving. The reason to teach young mages to Reave was not because the rune itself imbued them with great power, but because it forced them to confront and master themselves, to understand how their own spirits related to the world. To crystalize the distinctions, to train their intentions, and to force them to reconcile themselves with their actions, their actions with the rest of creation.
And then, at the last, to collapse the distinctions when it became useful to do so.
The witch’s sword turned translucent as she raised it, the matter of it falling away so that it was nothing but concept. Her mind was aether made energy, which directed her hand. Her hand was aether spun into flesh, and it grasped the hilt, which was aether crystalized into metal. The hilt held onto the tang and blade, which relapsed into aether in the form of pure spirit- soul, and body, and weapon all formed a gradient encompassing every state of being in the world. But it was all her.
The ring was not. It was also aether, but made manifest so long ago that no member of her race had been alive to see it. It had been mined and forged before the time of her birth, conceived of and worn before her soul was ever spat out of whatever great cosmic machine distributed them. It was not alive, and had no soul, not as such.
As the swordtip entered the ring, the arc of her soul fused with it, and memory flooded through her. She’d dragged vague impressions of the city from it before, the cobwebs of impressions it had gathered from centuries of wear; now she used it as a focus for something much larger, much closer to being alive itself. The long-departed legacy of her grandmother’s family.
At the height of the family’s power, the estate was full. There had never been more than about a dozen alchemists at any given time, but twelve alchemists meant more spouses, children, people doing busywork for the logistics or the accounting. It hadn’t quite been a business, not really; Kythera had supported its leading lights unconditionally across many fields of study, but it did expect some amount of return.
Imogen sensed, rather than saw them. The people of her grandmother’s line had not been ‘seen’ by the ring, and the information it contained was relatively rudimentary. In some ways, this was better than the alternative. It allowed her to simply let the relevance of the timeline fill her, rather than try to make sense of confused scenes, as she’d done back on Deravaecia’s beach.
She could feel them as shadows in the weft of the world, passing years in the span of instants. There, a scion of the house rebelled against his elders, fleeing to the country. Then he was returned, with wife, begging for readmission.
In the corner, a woman happened upon an obsession, a scuttling little shadow which spread through her psyche like a plague. She diverted all the energies of her house to chasing some impossible dream of transmutation, only to find death and ruin at the end, with them all diminished.
There, up at the desk, a man became complacent, squandering his family’s grand traditions and name in search of political favor. He became a counselor, but a puppet of greater masters, and ultimately his life ended without the realization of any great ambition.
Imogen staggered to one knee, her sword falling away from the ring as the world returned to normal about her.
"Damn.” she swore, to the attention of nobody in particular, "That’s useless.”
There was no way to tell for sure, but she thought the lab and the ring had probably been in her grandmother’s family for ten generations or more- and ten generations of lives, even of a single family’s history within a combined space, was simply too much to process. It certainly wouldn’t help her locate any kind of cure.
But it did give her an idea.
The room was lined with curios; trophies, maybe, or perhaps just exotic ingredients the alchemists had collected. Perhaps she could pull something a little more focused from those? If she kept her eyes on the prize, as it were…
The witch stalked over to one end of the room, where the carefully-preserved skeleton of a bird (with six wings?) was pinned to a wall. She breathed in, deeply, and emptied her mind of anything but desire for arcane, alchemical knowledge. Knowledge of cures. Gingerly, she touched the tip of her sword to the fragile skeleton-
A portly ork held the cage containing the six-winged bird up, beaming as he squinted between the bars. The bird screeched, and he scratched a note carefully into an enormous tome with a quill. It was said that the feathers of the Guissifen Aconica could be used to cure many diseases afflicting the scales- but that legend had made the birds elusive, for it was difficult to capture them without killing them, and harder yet to keep one alive in captivity. But if he could discover what substance…
Imogen pulled away. She’d had scale rashes from time to time, of course, but she had bigger concerns today. She took a step to the side, raising her transparent blade towards an eye, floating in a jar of amniotic fluid-
A stern Orkish woman sat in front of the chamber with the southern basilisk, careful only to study it through the contraption of lenses which separated her from the cage. The creature hissed and spat, its acidic bile sizzling against warded bars.
It wanted her to look at it, to catch her eye- it did not understand that the translucent layers of amber, emerald and sapphire in the lenses distorted its aetheric grasp too much, that it could not harm her that way. But if she could detect the patterns within its ever-shifting eyes, then maybe, just maybe she would be able to recreate the effect of its hypnotism. Carefully, she began to draw the eye on one page of the gigantic book next to her.
"That does sound useful.” Imogen admitted. It wasn’t going to be very helpful to her, though. Especially not while dead. She moved on once more, closing in on the big egg-
”Are you mad?” the man’s companion demanded, clutching the book to his chest, “The Hytori have given us trouble enough, and you steal that?”
“No,” the man replied, “I’m the only one of you who can see what is in front of your face. This is the key, don’t you see that?”
The two had left the alchemists’ safehouse through the secret passage below the floor grate, slipping into the old series of passages deep below Kythera. These had been maintenance tunnels, back when it was built, to allow the mages to access the heart of the city and ensure a constant flow of aether to all the domains. Neither of the alchemists could say why or when the secret passage to their family’s atelier had been made, but here it was.
“And what do you expect to do? What if it just… blows up or something? What if it makes some kind of giant monster?”
“It won’t.” he said, confident in that, “It will be the beginning of something beautiful. Something glorious.”
The two orkhan approached the heart, the intensity of its verdure so great that they could not look upon it directly. Resolutely, the man slipped on tinted goggles. He took the egg in both hands and held it up, exposing it to the heart’s energies, which-
Hadn’t done anything, it seemed. The egg was still sitting here, decades later, unhatched. Certainly not alive. Probably for the best, she reckoned.
But she was getting nowhere fast. There were hundreds, if not thousands of these bits and baubles in cabinets and shelves throughout the large chamber. She didn’t have time even to skim them all. She needed something more central, some repository of knowledge. Something like…
…there.
Sitting on a shelf on the south end of the room, inconspicuously conspicuous, was the huge book which had appeared in all three of her visions. It was large, of course, but she thought those three scenes had been generations apart. She knew from experience that even a bulky tome would fill up before then. That meant…
Imogen stepped carefully over a fallen chair and advanced carefully on the thing. It was bound in some kind of lizard-skin leather, and bore no label. She touched it carefully, just in case it began to disintegrate, then more forcefully, rolling it onto its spine. If she was right- yes. There. There were memnosytes sewn into the cover, all the way down the spine. Dozens of the little bastards.
She’d seen the like before- a sort of primitive precursor to the crystal tablets which had become popular in Gelerand, which Carina had spent a baffled night demonstrating to her. These could store a dozen books’ worth of text in the space of a single tome, allowing a virtual library of information to be inscribed within. It was the diary of generations of her ancestors, an entire legacy of alchemists. And this was where she would find her answer.
The witch turned her transparent blade onto its side, resting lightly in her palm, and inserted it delicately between the pages. Light shimmered across the book’s many memnosytes as their powers were invoked, ages of memory building within them. She twisted the hilt, turning her sword like a key-
Before her, Imogen saw a dozens of alchemists, each bearing violet eyes. Rainbow light shimmered around their opal scales as they moved about, conducting experiments, recording research, finding life and love and committing the barest fragment of it to the pages before they faded once again into the night from which all came.
She was witness, for just a moment, to the dance of those lives. It was beautiful, of course, but it was also almost desperately sad. Every single one of these souls, these beautiful, brilliant, unique visionaries, were gone from this world. Their works were forgotten now, their last fragments contained in a single book mustang at the edge of an atelier a thousand miles from any civilization. Their last witness, a girl on the verge of death herself.
As if that morbid thought had attracted their notice, the fleeting impressions of her ancestors’ ghosts turned upon Imogen, violet eyes locked upon her own. She felt their wisdom building, their knowledge pooling around the wound her sword had inflicted upon the shining tome.
She forced her mind clear, clean. A blank slate upon which the answer could arrive without confusion.
“Imogen.” they spoke as one, a collective voice which burned like brandy and fire, “There is no cure.”
Imogen found herself fallen on her ass, her pact sword having clattered uselessly to the side. The big book was just sitting there, a little less dusty for her having moved it about.
"WHAT?” the Ork demanded, uselessly, of nobody.
~~~
There is no cure.
The voices haunted her, burned into her mind from the exposure with the book. They seemed to follow her as she stumbled, catching herself against the stone wall, and carefully maneuvering down the stairwell.
She’d left the book there. For one, she was too rattled to even think about transporting it right now- but even when she calmed down, she’d realize that she wasn’t really equipped to transport such a valuable artifact to anyone who might have a use for it. SHE certainly wasn’t going to get much more out of centuries of alchemist scribblings.
Imogen had flipped through the thing in disbelief for a few minutes, but even the bits she could actually read (and this was being generous- the Ecithian she’d learned to write was of an entirely different dialect) were incomprehensible as far as she was concerned. She couldn’t have pulled an answer out by reading it, not if she had ten years to study it.
And she didn’t have ten years. She might not have ten days. There is no cure.
"Except there is.” the witch snarled to herself, slowing as she carefully descended further down the dark stone corridor. It wasn’t nearly as clean as it had been in her vision, choked now with fallen masonry and detritus, not to mention vines and roots, but it was still mostly navigable.
Noko had told her that there was a way to cure this, and it rested with her family’s history. Her family had just told her, in no uncertain terms, that they didn’t have it- but that wasn’t her whole lineage, was it? No, there was nothing in her grandmother’s family and nothing in her grandfather’s family… but what about after them?
She needed to get back to the Sunsingers. But she didn’t have time.
Didn’t have time yet.
The foundations of Kythera, back before it had been destroyed by war and the Queen, were in its plants and gardens. Of course, the foundations of Kythera were also literally masonry, for if anyone tried to stack two gardens one atop the other, she doubted it would work well. Plantlife and stone.
And below those? A living stone.
The details about the heart of the city were relatively scarce, but she’d pieced together enough to suspect what lay there, down in the depths, below the gardens and architecture both. Verdantite. One of the rarest and most expensive of all dragonshards, forming only over vast periods of time in the depths of those few forests which still stood after the Sundering. A stone powerful enough to be worth a damn would bankrupt even a mage.
The darkness ahead of Imogen began to lift, the room filling with green light. It was not as bright as it had been in the vision of the egg, but that was no surprise- the room was choked with vines. Not the sort of long-dormant vine which had worked its way into the stonework throughout the city, either; these pulsated with fresh life, with sap and juices.
One of the Queen’s taproots. Imogen thought grimly to herself. This was why every attempt to root out the new Primal had failed. Defeating one of the elemental beasts was one thing, one very, very difficult thing. But how would you contend with one which held an inexhaustible source of power and recovery?
The roots wound around a huge dragonshard. A shard’s size wasn’t always particularly indicative of power, of course, but she could sense the purity of this one from a hundred paces. The room practically buzzed with the life energy it contained. Even after fueling the Queen’s growth for nigh on thirty years, it contained enough raw power to give her pause. Trying to connect to a source of that much life energy… that could kill you stone dead, ironically. Too much of a good thing could be poison, and there was enough of a good thing in that rock to kill a hundred thousand of Imogen Ward.
(She wondered briefly how it had been transported- or had it, at all? Perhaps they built Kythera around this, rather than the other way?)
Thankfully, she didn’t need to touch it- gods knew, that might just waken the Queen, distract her from her battle with the Silent Fisher above. No, she just needed to harness some of the energy it was bleeding off.
Imogen located a patch of stone with the oldest-looking roots on it and cleared them away carefully, trying to tear them as little as possible to avoid the note of the grand power above her. She removed a pouch of Sorcerer’s sand from her coat, and carefully drew a basic circle upon the empty ground.
Then the witch ripped out her heart.
Well, okay, not really. That would have been a bad idea, on account of being instantly fatal. Instead, she pried the Gallstone out of her chest, wincing in agony as the skin which had loosely fused with it tore and bled. Gasping with pain, she placed the stone inside the circle, and waited.
After a moment, the runes of her little circle lit with green fire. It began to slowly draw power into the stone.
~~~
The witch couldn’t have said if it were minutes, hours, or days later when her little theft came to an end. Her vision was getting blurry without the Gallstone’s power to regenerate it, but she didn’t dare leave too quickly- after all, what odds were there that she’d ever get back? Still, she was aware that if she nodded off to unconsciousness, she might well just die there, lying on the overgrown stone floor.
And she was in the midst of nodding off when the sudden sound of protesting stone met her ears, somewhere far above her. The sounds of force, violence- though no shouting, nor any other animal noise. It could have been one of the Queen’s servitors, finally making its way down, or perhaps Kegumu Rekaka itself.
Imogen didn’t bother to find out. With a sudden burst of strength, she grabbed the Gallstone from the circle, noting its new lustre with some hope. She hesitated, wondering if she should slam it back into her chest right away- but good sense intervened. If pain or some other complication should make her pass out and either of the Primals caught up to her here, she was dead.
Instead, she called out to the distant light of Ailos, and let it silently draw her away, through stone and sea and endless miles. Sunlight bathed the chamber, momentarily overpowering the verdure of the heart, and then vanished, leaving absolutely nothing behind.
