Legend of Ransera

The discovery that they were going to be attacking now, alone, instead of in three days with a literal army... well, one might reasonably find this distressing. And it did distress the orkhan Sunsinger, but only somewhat. Mostly, she felt a profound sense of resignation.

Of course we're changing plans. she thought, It's Norani.

Not that she tried to protest any further. She'd seen the shock and horror in the young Elementalist's face when they'd arrived, the tears she'd been biting back at the state of the Tree. No doubt, affairs were a sight sorrier than they'd expected. And for Prince- uh, no, for Arcas to have showed up, that lent a certain weight to Norani's claims. Not that she had figured out what motivated him to show up one way or another, really.

Well, then, no point in trying to talk them out of it. Still, Imogen satisfied her own displeasure by releasing a long, moaning sigh.

The witch let her staff return to her hand, unwilling to dismiss it just yet. Putting her many--many!--misgivings aside, she carefully followed the floating elementalist down the sunfire-rimmed path.




The path down to the Grove was not long, but every moment was just a little harrowing. Arcas' shield of Dawnfire was orders of magnitude larger and more complicated than anything she'd ever seen one of his adherents do, but that didn't really surprise her. She'd seen what he'd done to the shadows in Gel'Grandal when the eclipse was fresh. Whatever nonsense might be contained in the myths about demigods, she didn't doubt that his aether dwarfed any mage's alive.

Still, she understood how the flames worked; they were not an invincible shield. She kept her staff at the ready, fire and light admixing on top to ensure that when the Dawnking's aegis shattered it wouldn't leave her in darkness.

As the three progressed, the state of their surroundings decayed- literally. First coatings of slime, then dripping sludge, then viscous oils pressing up against Arcas' fiery barrier with obvious intent. The Sunsinger watched intently as the sludge tried to press through the fire, recoiling as it burned only to burgeon again. It tickled something in the back of her brain. What was this stu-

Imogen's thoughts were banished by the sudden voices crying through the dark glade, and her head snapped up just in time to see a great amorphous thing of eyes and gelatin coalesce from the sludge surrounding. The voices perambulated through the air, seeming almost to get lost in the darkness before finally reaching her ears, and the rising tide of living sewage flowed strong against the shield of light.

(It was never a good sign, Imogen thought to herself, when the slime started talking.)

The demigod's barrier finally broke, and the living sludge cast itself at the companions victoriously. The sludge launched at them, but hardly had time to cross half the distance before Norani summoned a wind to disperse its attack. Bits of deflected sludge sprayed everywhere, and the witch instinctively summoned her greatshield, burning with silvery nova-fire, to intercept the droplets before they reached her or Destyn. The greyish-black slime boiled off the shield, releasing a greasy smoke.

Norani shouted something about conserving their strength, but Imogen hadn't quite gotten that far yet. Instead, she dipped the flaming head of her staff towards some of the ooze at the side of the path, eyes narrowed as she watched it cook.

"A beast of corrupted life." the witch mused to herself. She couldn't entirely hear Norani's question to the thing, nor did she speak Acherani, but she said nonetheless:

"A broken cycle, I think. Growth into flourishing into wilt into growth without end. Just as Frost chokes the world without, Agst'rasera drowns in a cycle with no cessation." Imogen turned lavender eyes to the path behind them, filling with more of the black sludge, and summoned her flaming sword, driving it back with a few lazy swings. She turned back to the girl floating above. "Norani! Ice! Ice to bind it and stop the growth!"

Destyn blinked in surprise, having had his eyes downcast when Arcas leaned forward to touch his forehead to the Fae's. His surprise was the greater for the glow that emitted, and the energy that he felt passing from divine flesh to Fae'ethalan. It seemed to bring some of the colour back to Destyn's hitherto pallid complexion, perhaps fighting back the effects of the corruption on one particularly sensitive to its influence.

He parted his lips to reply, but found himself speechless as Arcas took flight. His motion was so graceful that, for a moment, Destyn wondered whether he'd been overly critical of the inferior bird-like wings of the Avialae. But the moment passed, when he remembered that Arcas was a god and subject to special rules that didn't apply to the mortal Avialae who frequently blustered into his path over Kalzasi.

But there wasn't time to ponder much more than that, as Norani spoke up to highlight the need for haste in the work to come and to give the participants their instructions. Though Destyn hadn't been sure how he might contribute, it seemed Norani was a cogent leader who contrived to delegate a task to him via which he might actually have a meaningful impact on the outcome. His Rune of Summoning had been conferred by his clan... designated by his mother for reasons unknown to him. Perhaps this was the reason. Perhaps this was the moment he needed to connect with it again in ways he hadn't since the incident.

Destyn shielded his eyes with a breathy yelp as Arcas' flames extended into the darkness before them. As his eyes adjusted somewhat, he saw some sort of fell counterattack and the gathering of a dark mass of unnatural, sentient tar. He crouched slightly, before leaping up and catching his weight with the steady, blurry beat of his wings as he hovered behind his Orkhan companions. The expression on Destyn's face at seeing the oily eyes and hearing the discordant chorus of voices addressing them was some blend of horror, revulsion and sad disappointment.

“Oh, no, no, no...” He muttered, albeit in a voice quieter than the beat of his wings let alone any of the other sounds around them. Soon the entity was advancing upon them, and Destyn winced at the splatter that might have flecked him if not for Imogen's intervention. Snarling, he glared at the thing as, unwittingly, his eyes shone with the silver-white fury of this fledgling fae Justicar. The glow spread throughout his form, its preternatural flames beginning to ripple over his wings and the bare flesh of his unadorned torso and lower legs.

“Uhm... I am feeling, you know, very tingly right now...” He announced to no one in particular.

Sent by her winds to Imogen's ears, "I don't know how to make ice. I've only heard of it in stories."

Continuing forward, the entire place rumbled with the entity's reply to her question. Forget? What was it trying to forget? Norani looked back over her shoulder, seeing the sludge was beginning to overtake the path they had come down, sealing the way out. She shook it off, casting her eyes back forward. It didn't matter right now. If they couldn't stop this here and now, then escaping wouldn't matter. They would fight their way out afterwards if it came to that. Or..

As they ran deeper into the root cavern, she pondered on the information she'd gleaned. It was alive, it was intelligent, and it could feel. It had desires, and if it wished to forget, it must also know pain. It was hurting, but from what?

Winding through the roots, Norani paused as she saw the crystallized slime stabbing into the roots, causing it to bleed. Her hand reached out slowly, hesitantly, thinking back to her time with the tree. It had taught her many things, it had shown her the way of the elements, it helped her grow, to reform, and now it was hurting. But the World Tree had always been helping her, and she felt in her gut that it must be doing so now. She reached out to touch the sap, away from the crystal appendage, letting the sap stick to her hand.

She touched the sap to her face, crimson lines beneath her eyes, a smudging across her forehead and painted her tusks. The markings of the ancestors of her village. They were with her, the tree was with her, Imogen and Destyn and all the rest were with her. And she knew she needed to be stronger for what would come next.

Wordlessly, she continued onward until the path opened up into a larger cavern. There was a beautiful temple of twisted roots, like a nest maybe. Or a heart. From it spilled the elements, falling into an ocean of beauty and feeding them into the world. It would have been the most perfect of sights if not for the corruption etched into every surface, of the ominous, crimson light that shown from the Heart.

Norani watched with defensive curiosity as the tendrils of dust and rot and spore and decay formed into a personification of this corrupting being. And she listened as it spoke, pausing in her floating footsteps. It was attempting to sway them, to win them over, to seduce them. And she heard Yeva's sweet voice in her mind, speaking each of Norani's answers, all were words from Yeva, some Norani had heard, some she read, some she had felt, Norani's eyes shutting for a moment.

Sweet children…why do you fight?
I really do love you.

Why do you cling to the painful agony of light?
Today is a boon.

Do you not seek freedom from pain? From loss?
You are strong enough.

Come, sweet children, come to us. Give us your pain. Give us your suffering.
These will heal.

In us, there is peace. In us, there is silence. In us, there is unity.
I'll help you.

Come…
Her eyes opened once more, brimming with confidence, unwavering.

Norani was unfazed by the entity's words. Her path was one of love and growth and she carried the strength of so many people, of those that believed in her. She trusted in Imogen and Destyn to resist as well, and she cast a look back at them over her shoulder, a hand behind her back, using the signing portion of the Ecitharese language to try and communicate. One word, over and over, while her eyes signaled toward the heart of the tree, the hanging temple. Plan. She hoped they would understand.

She turned back towards shadowy figure with the glowing, red core, and took a step toward it. "What is your name?" It was a genuine question but she also sought to hold its attention so that her companions could enact the plan. "I am Norani Windwalker and I am here to help you. What is it that you fear?" She thought back to the words it had spoken, "Does the light of the world cause you pain?" Another step forward, but she was priming her aether within her, readying herself in case she needed to react quickly.

"What do you wish to forget?"

"You don't know-" Ah, fuck. That actually made quite a bit of sense, didn't it? Lucky Norani, living in the tropical climes, never needing to face the angry roil of icy winds off the Talacara... It simply hadn't occurred to Imogen that an elementalist might not know how to freeze things. Come to think of it, she didn't really know anything at all about elementalism.

Thankfully, the sludge seemed disinclined to fight them any longer. It withdrew, and they followed it deeper into the roots of Agst’rasera, where... well, things didn't start looking any better. If the witch were an arborist, she'd be talking about uprooting and replacing right about now, except where did one even get new world trees? Presumably Aedrin planted them, and the wait for his landscaping services could be measured in aeons.

(The tree sap flowing in torrents attracted more than just her alarm, though; she wondered if such a potent juice might not be filled with useful aether. If they had time to experiment, she might have tried to finagle a bottle of the stuff.)

When the three burst suddenly upon the temple beneath the tree, it took the ork only moments to understand that she was looking on another divine working. This was plainly a nexus of some sort- an organ by which elemental flows ought to be monitored or regulated in some fashion. Doubtless it had been beautiful once, sanctified and holy, a celebration of the cycles of nature. That only made it all the uglier now, covered in darkness and sickly red corruption.

The red light washed over Imogen's mind, speaking with its thousand voices of peace and unity. It was like oil rolling over the surface of water, and it made her stomach churn to hear it. The message was exactly the same as the things the twisted mutant in the Pfenning's hall had whispered, or the... well, no time right now for flashbacks to the Liar-beast. The point was that it was almost comically unaware of the very purpose of being, its words making a quiet mockery of life. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.

Norani made a covert hand sign, which Imogen did not even begin to understand the meaning of; thankfully, she didn't need to. The elementalist had positioned herself between the figure (which Imogen took to be the core of the corruption) and her companions, and she'd already made her intentions clear. She would fight the thing, they needed to try to free Ghoro, or whatever his name was. If this place was a true nexus, that meant the heart of it would be within the corroding temple, and that meant Norani's best chance was for Imogen and Destyn to get in there and do whatever could be done as quickly as possible.

The witch didn't have a lot of hope that Norani could keep the thing's attention long, but she didn't have any better ideas. She slowly swung her greatshield around, as surreptitiously as it is possible to move a levitating metal circle eight feet in diameter, until it was directly between herself and the corrupt figure.

"C'mon," she hissed to Destyn, "This way."

What she meant by that became apparent as she fed power into the Rune of Traversion, rapidly aligning the slipspace between herself and the temple on the other side of the monster. As she worked, the reflection in her Pact shield shifted to become an image of the temple's door. The surface of the shield grew translucent until it was hardly visible at all and then, for just a moment, formed a true portal across the distance, two matching doorways separated by only inches of colorless nothing.

The Ork dived for the portal, intent on getting into the temple as quickly as possible- but first and foremost, she brought a totem to the forefront of her body, using her third and final rune to adjust her own perception in the manner of the housefly, in case the creature had anticipated their ploy and was waiting to ambush her. Time seemed to slow down as the information coming in from her eyes and ears simplified, and she dashed for the temple door.

“I know what ice is! …but I cannot, you know, make any. So…” Destyn contributed, speaking loudly enough to be audible over the sound of his own wingbeats, which began to lift him higher. Now about twenty feet off the ground, he floated amongst his aerially-inclined allies and cast gusts of warm wind down in those who strode the freshly cleared path.

As they drew closer to the tree, Destyn grew as nauseous as he felt anguished. Nature, which was everything to his perished people, had been warped abysmally here. Now that he was the last of his clan, the impact was that much more severe. Lessons he’d taken for granted came back in tumultuous torrents.

By and by, they reached the temple and his mind’s meanderings were dismissed by the interloping words of the entity’s overture. He wrinkled his nose, some primal part of him offended at the invitation. How could Destyn ever dream of uniting with something so antithetical to his core? Parts of his body were as the accursed tree. To welcome this being would be to invite corruption. He would go as black and deathly as this realm they’d come to save.

“Never!” He rasped through clenched teeth, his silver fires glowing slightly brighter as he did so. Norani seemed to be communing with the entity, serving whether by happenstance or intent, as something of a distraction, whilst Imogen conjured an aetheric shortcut to their destination and beckoned Destyn down.

“Cosain Arcas mé!“ He curled his body like a diver as he went from vertical orientation into a diagonal, with his arms to his sides and his legs taut together— a mission propelled by blurry quick wings as he shot down and through the portal, reaching the other side and hovering to take stock of what lay before him with cryotochrome eyes. He cried out in a chestier timbre than any here had heard from him, as his long silent Rune of Summoning woke for the first time in over a year.

“Spirits, awaken! Ghoron, I call to thee and thine! Come and know the nourishing light too long denied ye!”

Norani hesitated as the being of darkness spread, opening up into a space of darkness, urging her inside. A new instinct was born in that moment, and as the darkness grew, Norani's body began to glow, to emit the Light that was new to her. She was hit with a smell she wasn't so familiar with, more of this rot but... older. Deeper. Like that in the oldest grasses of her homeland. And soon, she heard winds coming, ancient winds, scared and confused winds, speaking in a tongue that she did not recognize, but she could feel them. Where they came from, they had been trapped for a long time, unable to be in the world for which they were created.

And then the footsteps, came and Norani could feel her fear rising. Whatever was coming, whoever it was, this was it, surely. The being behind all of this, it had to be. The world slowed, and Norani knew not what Imogen nor Destyn were up to. She could not hear them, could not feel them as her world came into blinders. That familiar gait, the shorter stature and slighter of build, then her own earthen eyes fell upon the smile she knew far too well. And with that, she staggered backwards a step, then two, as all the stolen memories of Juno crashed back into her violently.

Flashbacks of them running through the grasses as small children, laughing and screaming in a game. Holding each other in fear as a storm raged around them in the grasses. A gasp escaped Norani's lips, as the onslaught continued, them growing older, Juno taking the path of animal care and healing like her parents, Norani chasing the dream of the warrior. The first time they held hands as they walked around Lake Nora and the time that while sleeping under the stars, Juno rubbed her nose to Norani's.

Tears were flowing heavily as Norani just gaped, unable to comprehend her entire world now. A bare whisper... "Juno..." Her heart swelled. It was Juno! She was alive and real! And here! And Norani could remember everything. She took a step forward. Two. Arms coming up so that she could embrace her oldest and dearest friend she thought lost forever. But as she went to take a third step, she faltered. Her foot wouldn't rise. Confused, she looked down, seeing mud and earth there, enveloping her foot, holding her in place. She could feel the element there urging her to stay, to stop.

She was instantly reminded of her time beneath Drathera, trying to understand the earthen elements and spirits there. And she knew in this moment what was happening. They were protecting her, helping her, guiding her. And so, Norani listened. She stopped. She waited. She took a breath and tried to be patient, steadied as earth is oft to do. She cast her eyes back up at Juno, seeing the pitch black eyes, corruption in her veins. This was Juno, she knew that much, but it wasn't Juno alone. She had to remember what she discovered when she first hear Juno's voice over a year ago.

'I don't know, Norani, but please find me, find all of us. It's so dark here. And when it takes us...'

"Your eyes are violet as the water lilies back home..."

No, Juno wasn't alone. Juno was taken by the Unknown, and the Unknown was here, now, with her. Fear was rising in Norani's heart, standing before her friend, overwhelmed by emotion, as well as the most ancient and evil of enemies her people have ever known. Juno would need saved, the Unknown would need to be stopped, Ghoron and the others saved, the corruption to be stopped. It was so much that needed done.

Norani cast her eyes down at the soil at her feet, "No matter how fast I get, I'm always too late." She was too late from hunting when Yeva disappeared, she was too late from Ecith that Agst'rasera became so corrupted, and she was too late to rescue Juno before the Unknown took more of her.

An anger was starting to rise in her. And she let it bloom like a flame, growing into a fervent passion, igniting through her entire body. "You were never lost and you were never forgotten." She pulled the earth up into her body, and she crouched back into a readied stance, "You were taken. And I'm going to take you back."

She cast out her aether, tinged with the universal tongue of spirits intermingled, calling upon the winds that had been released from where Juno came. 'Answer my call and I will guide you to freedom. Help me to help her and we will free the winds and elements that remain behind, together.' But they did not answer her. Startled, she reached out again, and they refused her again. Her fear grew, never had the winds responded in such a way. Not since... the night she first heard Juno's voice, when the winds were corrupted by the chaos storms ravaging the world.

These winds were just as corrupted as Juno was, as this land was, as everything would be if they failed.

She only knew one way to deal with corruption and that had very nearly gone badly for everyone. Wielding Imogen's Dawnfire had worked but it was... a power borrowed. Not one of her own. She needed to be stronger, and she needed to do this herself, so that her companions could do their mission. She trusted them, and she needed to live up to her end of the trust.

With a blink, she snapped into her Lightning Prescient state with a massive thunderclap that boomed through the cavern. And she listened to the newest element that joined her, offering its own protection, and she called upon it too, to feed Light into her form, radiating brightness throughout the darkened corridor, the cavern. And she remembered the smell of the rot, the same rot and musk that was permeating the mountain. And so, she called upon Water, upon Glorpb Glorpb within her body into her form, tasked with the soul purpose of removing the water from the rot. She called upon Aetu, adding his fire to her form, to dry and burn what remained of the rot and corruption. She called upon Ooshi and the winds into her form, to reach out to the lost and confused winds, to help bring them back into the natural order, to know what it meant to be working with the world again.

And she called upon earth to steady her own heart.

And with a second blink, she disappeared down the darkened corridor, as fast as lightning could strike, hoping that Juno would be strong enough to survive, and that she herself was strong enough to make it happen. She was face to face with Juno, an arm of pure lightning reaching out, grasping the tainted flesh, and surging her elementally charged power through Juno, to burn out the corruption and bring her friend home.

And a moment later, thunder clapped again, only now catching up to her.

A quick review of their new surrounds confirmed Imogen's suspicions about the nature of this place--pun notwithstanding--and only redoubled her impression of its corrupt nature. For a moment, the overwhelming aura of rot and shadow was almost strong enough to drown in, a force so completely dominant that it seemed as physical as water. But as Destyn conjured his circle of dawnfire and created a momentary, fragile bubble of balance, she was able to regain her composure and senses.

To an outside observer, the Sunsinger's reaction to the corrupt beast's descent might seem puzzling. Far from a reaction of fear or disgust, her lavender eyes seemed to light with purpose, and her mouth resolved into a strange look of... relief? Happiness? Something in that vein.

But it wasn't all that mysterious. At last, it appeared that there was a problem she could resolve with simple, brutal force.

"Try to release Mr. Gordon," she told Destyn, getting the titan's name wrong a third time, "I'll take a crack at whatever this is."

She focused her attention on the approaching thing, paying particular attention to the caustic ooze of its body and the radiating rot drifting like smoke from its eyes. It wouldn't do to take this thing lightly; it had overcome one protector already, and she suspected that all of her magic would be of little help if it managed to surround her. So, it would be best if she could put it on the defensive, avoid overcommitting to anything. What did she know about it?

First, it clearly hated dawnfire, which was a good reason to suspect that light could harm it.

Second, it spread corruption to anything it touched, which meant that avoiding contact was a must.

Third, it seemed to be an amorphous creature, which meant that glancing blows wouldn't do much... unless, of course...

That was enough for a start. As the monster's hands approached the witch and fae, she gestured to the air in front of her, summoning her Pact spear out of nothingness. The weapon began to emit an aura of nova-fire, as usual, but Imogen stilled the expansion of the fire with a gesture. The ork held out her right arm, where opal scales were rising to the surface of her skin as the monster approached. She ran her left hand along her forearm, invoking Animus to transform the scales from chitin to copper. In a sing-song voice, the witch intoned:

"Solitary lurker in shadow,
Don't expect to win by fiat;
You would have the fire be extinguished?
Light can be far crueler than that."

The nova-fire finished sinking back into the surface of her Pact spear, limning the brass weapon with a clean aura of silver light, and Imogen reached out and grasped it with her copper-covered hand. Copper ran down the substrate of the weapon's shaft, apparently to no effect at all.

Then the Sunsinger leveled the spear at the approaching creature, and a sudden, intense sense of wrongness filled the air around her. The soft light emanating from the spear did not shift, but something about the radiance seemed unaccountably harsher. In the air around her, the spores and bacteria began to die in droves, cells suddenly withering as an invisible force tore bits of them away. The rot on the wood walls near Imogen began to turn grey- likewise, the moss underneath her began to brown.

The ork lifted her left hand and pointed to each of the encroaching hands in turn. As she indicated each, copies of her glowing spear manifested in the air around her, coalescing like ice crystals in a storm of light. One by one, she fired them at the appendages like harpoons, spear after spear whistling through the dank air of the temple, leaping and diving for the hands like hawks seeking prey. Each weapon sterilized the air as it passed, plunging into the dark extremities only to explode in bursts of nova-fire, creating little eruptions of light which scoured clean everything nearby.

Imogen ignored the hand getting closest to her until it seemed almost in place to grab, and then drew her spear back and charged it. She took a few steps towards it, her agility belying her stocky Orkhan frame, and then planted her feet in the damp earth twisting to bring the spearpoint around at the black extremity with all the weight and force she could muster. As she drove the point forward, however, she blinked, her body and thrust alike disappearing from the world only to reappear a meter away from the creature's porcelain core, the tip of her spear driving towards its rotting eyes.

This chamber, so consummately corrupt and cut off from all that nourished Destyn might have withered him were it not for Arcas’ recent endowment. He’d felt a drain since he first drew near this place and innately he knew that he’d not have survived bereft of this new Mark into which Arcas was feeding enough of His essence to not only sustain Destyn, but also to empower him.

Destyn winced, his body recoiling into a defensive posture as fell protrusions burst forth to skewer him, only to be offset by an aegis of Dawnfire that formed around him. As his limbs relaxed and his legs hung loosely where he hovered, his eyes found the bound figure and widened at the sight of him. He parted his lips to address the potent prisoner, but another voice sounded above and he reared back slightly to regard the image forming from the core of the rot.

“Honey words on brimstone breath…” He muttered with a grimace that broadcast his revulsion. Did this being, which had doubtless been the consciousness that sought to spear them moments earlier, think they would be so simply seduced? That it bade him to extinguish his fires only vindicated their potency as a weapon that would prosper against the perversion as it had purified the assailing vines.

This Dawnfire was passing nascent to Destyn’s reckoning. He was no seasoned Dawnmartyr, versed and practised in wielding Arcas’ Craft. He could only pray to the source of this power and yield up his body that Arcas might work through him. If he burned up in the force of Arcas’ might like a moth drawn too close to a candle, then so be it as long as the flames purified this warped place and restored the balance of the natural world. Reverting to his mothertongue, that the truth of his intent be not misconstrued, Destyn turned his heart and mind to his Saviour and called through his mouth, his Rune and his Emblem:

“Arcas, tabhair dom do chumhacht. Beidh mé i do shoitheach naofa - nigh mé i do Sholas!” (Arcas, lend me your power. I will be your holy avatar— bathe me in your Light!)

And with that he turned his gaze toward the fetid fetters that constrained the hornèd figure and, Arcas willing, projected the purifying fires of the Lightbringer to liberate the bound man from this putrid prison.