Ash 31, 122
Previously:
The first night was something of a blur to Imogen, and she hoped that there wasn’t too much of note going on in the seashore below her, because she couldn’t see it. Unlike the day before, this was intentional; she was quite capable of altering the albatross form’s eyes to obtain superior night vision, but she suspected this would only enhance her pounding migraine.
That headache might have been simply from the pain, or it could be that some lingering aetherial poison remained sloshing about in her aura. Thankfully, this was a type of threat to which the Sunsinger magic was adapted. A mundane poison was a threat which would require treatment, but a magical poison had to infiltrate the great blazing core of nova fire which surrounded her Cardinal Runes. If it did not kill her quickly, her magic would eventually burn it out of her aura and correct any damage.
In service to that, Imogen locked her albatross wings in place and let her heartbeat slow. It wasn’t exactly sleep, but it was closer than waking. She let her thinking mind grind slowly down, and flew through the night, silent within and without.
When dawn came, Imogen returned to her senses, pleased to find that she was feeling much better. As she’d hoped, her quick Transmutation seemed to have burned most of the poison out of her soul; a cheery thought until she remembered just how close the un-snakes had come to driving their venomous fangs into her flesh.
What would have happened then? Imogen wondered, Infected my Animus? Infected my entire being? Could a serpent really poison a soul like that? What would that do, given time? The thought was too dire to bear more consideration.
But she wondered… what if she used one of them as a totem?
A thought for some other time. For now, there was something new catching her eye- flashing underneath the canopy. Not like a signal mirror, no, but sparkling among the trees, for hundreds of yards.
Imogen worked her way over but, mindful of the lesson of the un-snakes from the previous day, did not descend too far. She circled in the fresh sea breeze, describing lazy loops against the brilliant blue sky until she spotted some sparkles which were a few meters out from the underbrush.
Cautiously, she descended, peering at the shining spots on the sand until, at last, one resolved into…
A beetle! It was a large beetle, by the standards of the mainland, probably too big to fit comfortably in Imogen’s palm, but tiny by Ecithian notions. Its back was gray, and mirror-bright, reminding Imogen almost of a suit of armor. Experimentally, she pecked at it with her long seabird’s beak.
Ting!
The beetle rang with a sweet, bell-like tone. Imogen struck it a few more times, with more force.
Ting! Ting! Ting!
Now here was a marvel. The shell of this little creature did not simply look like metal- it was metal! As Imogen hopped about the beetle, she could see that the carapace was a shifting tapestry of beautiful metallic hues- waves of copper and iron intermixing with strange blue metal.
Although she couldn’t think of any immediate use for the creatures, her witch’s intuition told her that the people back at camp just might. She was disinclined to try to kill the little metal insect standing motionless at her webbed feet, so she hopped over to the undergrowth, casting about until she found the motionless corpse of an obviously-dead beetle. She extended a marsupial tail from her back and deftly grabbed the motionless bug, pulling it close to her body, where it could be comfortably held for another day or two.
Having accomplished her goal, Imogen looked up- and realized that she was on the precipice of a great hollow bowl, hidden beneath the canopy. The bowl, invisible from above, seemed totally empty, except that it was filled with eggs; small, the size of a chicken’s egg. All of them were blue.
All of them were glowing.
A strange sense of dire, urgent fear overtook Imogen. She could see no predators, no nesting mothers, no danger within this strange clearing… but she felt, with absolute certainty, that if she took even a single hop beyond the edge of the hollow, there would not even be seabird feathers left for Avamande to find.
Imogen hopped backwards a few paces and took off into the sky. She did not look back to check if anything watched her go.
She wouldn’t have seen it if she had.
On the third day of her lone expedition north, Albagen Ward finally spotted the great shieldwall of mountains which must separate the jungle from the desert she’d been sent to locate. The sight filled her with renewed hope, and she picked up her pace… marginally. In truth, the winds still controlled her speed, by and large, and they were brisk in the wrong direction entirely.
Nevertheless, Imogen made good progress over the coastline, and the jungle began to fall away, further and further to the west, as she approached the mountains to the north. This, too, gave her some confidence; in her (very limited) experience, the really dangerous predators liked to live in the verdant jungle. With the land open around her, she would have plenty of time to spot predators and introduce them to her pact spear at leisure.
Spirits thus lifted, she began to round the first of the mountains, studying the rocky coastline. She’d flown over a thousand miles north at this point- but the climate had, if anything, gotten even hotter. Certainly confirmation that The Duck had deposited them nowhere in Karnor.
Not that they needed any confirmation of that.
Partway through the mountains, the Sunsinger decided to abandon the coastline, just for a few hours, and get a better idea of the inland terrain. It was a minor deviation from the plan she had worked out with Avamande, to be sure. And again, it proved just minor enough to nearly end her life.
As Imogen made her way over a small creek, she noticed a truly bizarre feature on one of the mountainsides. The huge red face of the mountain bore a cavern, the entry to which was a perfect dodecahedron.
The Sunsinger witch had never attended any of Zaichaer’s prestigious institutes of higher education prior to their abrupt extinction, but the coven had ensured that their young initiates had plenty of access to educational books. That didn’t help because Imogen had also blown off reading any of the works of geometry or mathematical science, but she was still pretty sure that this was not a common shape in nature.
The albatross soared closer, wings unflapping. For most of the length of the mountain, the flora pressed right up against the stone face, but there was a twenty-foot clearing in front of this cave opening. What was going on, here? Could it have been intentionally bored, perhaps by the mythical Solunarians of the north?
The witch approached even closer, flapping her wings just once. It was just one flap, but a significant one. First, the flapping of an albatross is a fairly majestic sight. Their wings are wider than a man is tall, and the act of flapping them displaces enough air to be quite audible.
Second, the disturbance of air alerted the butterflies.
The cloud emerged from the cavern as one, like they were a single great swarm rather than a thousand single insects. Each one was small–this time, small for anywhere, not just Ecith–and they were not swift. They meandered in their flight, and their translucent wings caught the sun and sparkled like crystal as they did. On this quiet day, one could hear a pleasant tinkling noise, like the glass bells which some Kalzasearn women placed around their gardens. It was a beautiful sight and sound both.
Perhaps that was their trick to finding prey. As noted, the swarm was not swift, though it could have easily overtaken a fast-walking ork. It was, however, flying with the wind, and Imogen thought little of that until the first butterfly meandered close enough to cut through one of her wing feathers.
And that was when she realized she was about to die.
The instant she realized the insects were razor-sharp, Imogen plunged toward the ground, hoping to evade the insects through an aerial maneuver. Sadly for her, this was not to be. For one thing, albatrosses are not made to dive and swoop. For another, the wind grasped her as she went, arresting her flight.
So it was that she discovered that the butterfly wings were not made of glass. They were made of aerolyth.
She wasn’t going to be able to escape these butterflies in the air. Each insect was tiny; an individual butterfly’s wings must comprise less crystal than went into a Gelarian caster shell (which were more efficient than Zaichaeri models). Yet a swarm of thousands, acting instinctively, could direct enough air to tear any bird apart, even if that bird happened to be an expert mage.
She cast about in every direction for salvation. The obvious method, of course, was to try to scatter the swarm, to knock them about and confuse them enough to get away- so she called forth golden spears, each limned with silver fire, and hurled them telekinetically at the dancing aerolyth butterflies. Unpleasant shattering sounds filled the air, followed by bursts of wind as her weapons crashed into the delicate creatures and exploded their tiny reserves of wind aether. The attack successfully broke the swarm apart, but its direction did not change, and the air continued to fight her.
Another butterfly flew past, this one cutting at the feathers on her belly and leaving a tiny red line across the albatross’ skin.
”Absolutely fucking not.” the bird swore aloud, in a perfect Zaichaeri accent, ”I categorically refuse to be killed by butterflies.”
Still, it wasn’t at all clear she had much of a choice. She’d run out of aether quickly if she kept firing her Arsenal at the butterflies, and it wasn’t even stopping the threat. What she needed was…
Imogen’s tail twitched, and a terrible idea came to mind. It was time to conduct the fastest Totem-bonding in the history of Ecith.
As a technical matter, actually, the bonding wasn’t terribly unusual. Certainly Imogen hadn’t spent time meditating on the beetle per se, but she had spent almost twenty-four hours holding it, and she’d spent much of that time thinking about the beetle, and much of the rest in… a state akin to meditation. Furthermore, Imogen had become sufficiently expert in the use of the Rune that the process of absorbing the totem taught her all she needed to know to achieve synchronicity.
Still, admittedly, it was a bit of a rush job.
When the rain of golden spears abruptly stopped, the entire swarm of aerolyth butterflies surged forward as one, their wings fluttering swiftly to rip and tear directly into the tender-
The first butterfly’s wing came down on a carapace made literally of iron, and shattered. The butterfly tumbled helplessly to the ground, leaking aether as it went. More of the bugs crashed into Beetlegen Ward, some breaking, some merely bouncing haplessly off the suddenly-descending, invulnerable shell.
The swarm continued to circle for another minute, tinkling with anxiety and confusion as it failed to locate the blood-filled prey it had sought. The metal beetle began to back away, towards the edge of the clearing, and Imogen refused to look up or expose any vulnerable flesh until the sounds of jangling crystal faded away.
When at last she had put enough distance between herself and the cave of horrors, Imogen returned to the form of the albatross and stole as quickly as she could into the high air, as far away from the insects as possible.
”And stay down,” the bird muttered to herself ”Don’t even try to come after me, I can go twice as high as you, butterflies.”
Having learned her lesson (this time for sure), Imogen returned to the coastline and resumed her trip north.
~~~
Having spent three days in one liminal space, she stood now in another- where the mountains of the northern range gave way, suddenly, into a vast and desolate waste, stretching north for uncountable, endless miles.
She was physically exhausted. Burnt out. Spent. She had been traveling for three straight days, and the rest of the albatross was not quite a perfect substitute for sleep. Her aura had been poisoned, she had been attacked by crystal butterflies.
But there it was. The thing.
The Atraxian Expanse.
…
Imogen summoned her great mirrored shield, materializing it in the air before her face, and observing her own reflection for a moment, then raised her right hand as it, as if to lay her palm against it. Instead, she looked at the sun ring Carina had given her, the stylized star reflecting the twilight fitfully, and focused on that, allowing Carina to sense the sudden surge of exhaustion and triumph in her aura.
”I think-” she said aloud, even before any Window had opened, ”That I am ready to come back, now.”
Previously:
- Imogen Ward set off on her journey northward!
- She saw lovely beaches!
- She saw petrified eggs the size of large dogs!
- She encountered hideous un-snakes!
- She reforged her sword in the heart of a tree to burn out the poison!
- She has been having a hell of a day at work!
The first night was something of a blur to Imogen, and she hoped that there wasn’t too much of note going on in the seashore below her, because she couldn’t see it. Unlike the day before, this was intentional; she was quite capable of altering the albatross form’s eyes to obtain superior night vision, but she suspected this would only enhance her pounding migraine.
That headache might have been simply from the pain, or it could be that some lingering aetherial poison remained sloshing about in her aura. Thankfully, this was a type of threat to which the Sunsinger magic was adapted. A mundane poison was a threat which would require treatment, but a magical poison had to infiltrate the great blazing core of nova fire which surrounded her Cardinal Runes. If it did not kill her quickly, her magic would eventually burn it out of her aura and correct any damage.
In service to that, Imogen locked her albatross wings in place and let her heartbeat slow. It wasn’t exactly sleep, but it was closer than waking. She let her thinking mind grind slowly down, and flew through the night, silent within and without.
~~~ Day Two ~~~
When dawn came, Imogen returned to her senses, pleased to find that she was feeling much better. As she’d hoped, her quick Transmutation seemed to have burned most of the poison out of her soul; a cheery thought until she remembered just how close the un-snakes had come to driving their venomous fangs into her flesh.
What would have happened then? Imogen wondered, Infected my Animus? Infected my entire being? Could a serpent really poison a soul like that? What would that do, given time? The thought was too dire to bear more consideration.
But she wondered… what if she used one of them as a totem?
A thought for some other time. For now, there was something new catching her eye- flashing underneath the canopy. Not like a signal mirror, no, but sparkling among the trees, for hundreds of yards.
Imogen worked her way over but, mindful of the lesson of the un-snakes from the previous day, did not descend too far. She circled in the fresh sea breeze, describing lazy loops against the brilliant blue sky until she spotted some sparkles which were a few meters out from the underbrush.
Cautiously, she descended, peering at the shining spots on the sand until, at last, one resolved into…
A beetle! It was a large beetle, by the standards of the mainland, probably too big to fit comfortably in Imogen’s palm, but tiny by Ecithian notions. Its back was gray, and mirror-bright, reminding Imogen almost of a suit of armor. Experimentally, she pecked at it with her long seabird’s beak.
Ting!
The beetle rang with a sweet, bell-like tone. Imogen struck it a few more times, with more force.
Ting! Ting! Ting!
Now here was a marvel. The shell of this little creature did not simply look like metal- it was metal! As Imogen hopped about the beetle, she could see that the carapace was a shifting tapestry of beautiful metallic hues- waves of copper and iron intermixing with strange blue metal.
Although she couldn’t think of any immediate use for the creatures, her witch’s intuition told her that the people back at camp just might. She was disinclined to try to kill the little metal insect standing motionless at her webbed feet, so she hopped over to the undergrowth, casting about until she found the motionless corpse of an obviously-dead beetle. She extended a marsupial tail from her back and deftly grabbed the motionless bug, pulling it close to her body, where it could be comfortably held for another day or two.
Having accomplished her goal, Imogen looked up- and realized that she was on the precipice of a great hollow bowl, hidden beneath the canopy. The bowl, invisible from above, seemed totally empty, except that it was filled with eggs; small, the size of a chicken’s egg. All of them were blue.
All of them were glowing.
A strange sense of dire, urgent fear overtook Imogen. She could see no predators, no nesting mothers, no danger within this strange clearing… but she felt, with absolute certainty, that if she took even a single hop beyond the edge of the hollow, there would not even be seabird feathers left for Avamande to find.
Imogen hopped backwards a few paces and took off into the sky. She did not look back to check if anything watched her go.
She wouldn’t have seen it if she had.
~~~ Day Three ~~~
On the third day of her lone expedition north, Albagen Ward finally spotted the great shieldwall of mountains which must separate the jungle from the desert she’d been sent to locate. The sight filled her with renewed hope, and she picked up her pace… marginally. In truth, the winds still controlled her speed, by and large, and they were brisk in the wrong direction entirely.
Nevertheless, Imogen made good progress over the coastline, and the jungle began to fall away, further and further to the west, as she approached the mountains to the north. This, too, gave her some confidence; in her (very limited) experience, the really dangerous predators liked to live in the verdant jungle. With the land open around her, she would have plenty of time to spot predators and introduce them to her pact spear at leisure.
Spirits thus lifted, she began to round the first of the mountains, studying the rocky coastline. She’d flown over a thousand miles north at this point- but the climate had, if anything, gotten even hotter. Certainly confirmation that The Duck had deposited them nowhere in Karnor.
Not that they needed any confirmation of that.
Partway through the mountains, the Sunsinger decided to abandon the coastline, just for a few hours, and get a better idea of the inland terrain. It was a minor deviation from the plan she had worked out with Avamande, to be sure. And again, it proved just minor enough to nearly end her life.
As Imogen made her way over a small creek, she noticed a truly bizarre feature on one of the mountainsides. The huge red face of the mountain bore a cavern, the entry to which was a perfect dodecahedron.
The Sunsinger witch had never attended any of Zaichaer’s prestigious institutes of higher education prior to their abrupt extinction, but the coven had ensured that their young initiates had plenty of access to educational books. That didn’t help because Imogen had also blown off reading any of the works of geometry or mathematical science, but she was still pretty sure that this was not a common shape in nature.
The albatross soared closer, wings unflapping. For most of the length of the mountain, the flora pressed right up against the stone face, but there was a twenty-foot clearing in front of this cave opening. What was going on, here? Could it have been intentionally bored, perhaps by the mythical Solunarians of the north?
The witch approached even closer, flapping her wings just once. It was just one flap, but a significant one. First, the flapping of an albatross is a fairly majestic sight. Their wings are wider than a man is tall, and the act of flapping them displaces enough air to be quite audible.
Second, the disturbance of air alerted the butterflies.
The cloud emerged from the cavern as one, like they were a single great swarm rather than a thousand single insects. Each one was small–this time, small for anywhere, not just Ecith–and they were not swift. They meandered in their flight, and their translucent wings caught the sun and sparkled like crystal as they did. On this quiet day, one could hear a pleasant tinkling noise, like the glass bells which some Kalzasearn women placed around their gardens. It was a beautiful sight and sound both.
Perhaps that was their trick to finding prey. As noted, the swarm was not swift, though it could have easily overtaken a fast-walking ork. It was, however, flying with the wind, and Imogen thought little of that until the first butterfly meandered close enough to cut through one of her wing feathers.
And that was when she realized she was about to die.
The instant she realized the insects were razor-sharp, Imogen plunged toward the ground, hoping to evade the insects through an aerial maneuver. Sadly for her, this was not to be. For one thing, albatrosses are not made to dive and swoop. For another, the wind grasped her as she went, arresting her flight.
So it was that she discovered that the butterfly wings were not made of glass. They were made of aerolyth.
She wasn’t going to be able to escape these butterflies in the air. Each insect was tiny; an individual butterfly’s wings must comprise less crystal than went into a Gelarian caster shell (which were more efficient than Zaichaeri models). Yet a swarm of thousands, acting instinctively, could direct enough air to tear any bird apart, even if that bird happened to be an expert mage.
She cast about in every direction for salvation. The obvious method, of course, was to try to scatter the swarm, to knock them about and confuse them enough to get away- so she called forth golden spears, each limned with silver fire, and hurled them telekinetically at the dancing aerolyth butterflies. Unpleasant shattering sounds filled the air, followed by bursts of wind as her weapons crashed into the delicate creatures and exploded their tiny reserves of wind aether. The attack successfully broke the swarm apart, but its direction did not change, and the air continued to fight her.
Another butterfly flew past, this one cutting at the feathers on her belly and leaving a tiny red line across the albatross’ skin.
”Absolutely fucking not.” the bird swore aloud, in a perfect Zaichaeri accent, ”I categorically refuse to be killed by butterflies.”
Still, it wasn’t at all clear she had much of a choice. She’d run out of aether quickly if she kept firing her Arsenal at the butterflies, and it wasn’t even stopping the threat. What she needed was…
Imogen’s tail twitched, and a terrible idea came to mind. It was time to conduct the fastest Totem-bonding in the history of Ecith.
~~~
As a technical matter, actually, the bonding wasn’t terribly unusual. Certainly Imogen hadn’t spent time meditating on the beetle per se, but she had spent almost twenty-four hours holding it, and she’d spent much of that time thinking about the beetle, and much of the rest in… a state akin to meditation. Furthermore, Imogen had become sufficiently expert in the use of the Rune that the process of absorbing the totem taught her all she needed to know to achieve synchronicity.
Still, admittedly, it was a bit of a rush job.
~~~
When the rain of golden spears abruptly stopped, the entire swarm of aerolyth butterflies surged forward as one, their wings fluttering swiftly to rip and tear directly into the tender-
The first butterfly’s wing came down on a carapace made literally of iron, and shattered. The butterfly tumbled helplessly to the ground, leaking aether as it went. More of the bugs crashed into Beetlegen Ward, some breaking, some merely bouncing haplessly off the suddenly-descending, invulnerable shell.
The swarm continued to circle for another minute, tinkling with anxiety and confusion as it failed to locate the blood-filled prey it had sought. The metal beetle began to back away, towards the edge of the clearing, and Imogen refused to look up or expose any vulnerable flesh until the sounds of jangling crystal faded away.
When at last she had put enough distance between herself and the cave of horrors, Imogen returned to the form of the albatross and stole as quickly as she could into the high air, as far away from the insects as possible.
”And stay down,” the bird muttered to herself ”Don’t even try to come after me, I can go twice as high as you, butterflies.”
Having learned her lesson (this time for sure), Imogen returned to the coastline and resumed her trip north.
~~~
Having spent three days in one liminal space, she stood now in another- where the mountains of the northern range gave way, suddenly, into a vast and desolate waste, stretching north for uncountable, endless miles.
She was physically exhausted. Burnt out. Spent. She had been traveling for three straight days, and the rest of the albatross was not quite a perfect substitute for sleep. Her aura had been poisoned, she had been attacked by crystal butterflies.
But there it was. The thing.
The Atraxian Expanse.
…
Imogen summoned her great mirrored shield, materializing it in the air before her face, and observing her own reflection for a moment, then raised her right hand as it, as if to lay her palm against it. Instead, she looked at the sun ring Carina had given her, the stylized star reflecting the twilight fitfully, and focused on that, allowing Carina to sense the sudden surge of exhaustion and triumph in her aura.
”I think-” she said aloud, even before any Window had opened, ”That I am ready to come back, now.”