Ash 75, 122
It was early morning in Ash, but in the southern latitude of Ecith, the sun still stood high in the sky. So did the moon. In the same place.
And this was driving Imogen Ward to madness.
There was nothing surprising in her negative reaction to the eclipse and its... side-effects, really. Firstly, Imogen had always identified herself with imagery of the sun. The ring which Carina had bought her bore a sun motif; her cabin on The Duck had made celestial reference. She had been initiated in the shadow of a great sun-motif'd rock, she had marked her smuggled goods with black suns. She was part of a militaristic cult called "the Sunsingers" and she did in fact meditate to the words of a sun-focused song, in fulfillment of all expectation thereof. Obviously it was a bit heartbreaking to have seen so little of the sun these past few days.
-except that none of that was it. Imogen had spent the last decade training as a witch, mastering the runes she had been granted to a degree seldom reached by practitioners, and had made them part of her life. She infused her body with the powers of animal kingdoms in day-to-day practice, for sheer convenience. She walked in strange places, utterly unbothered by the threat of any danger due primarily to her ever-present power to manifest an arbitrary number of enormous swords and skewer anyone and anything. Even her regular gait, while walking, had been improved in some miniscule fashion by the addition of the white lemur's tail to her ass.
And now, with minimal fanfare, this random celestial event had chosen to cut her connection to those powers as casually as a weaver snipped a loose thread.
So when the tenth day since the first eclipse dawned and the damned orb of bright-limned shadow still commanded the heavens, the Ork woman realized that she would need to do something. Not "something about it", to be clear; even with full access to her runes she couldn't do anything about the fucking firmament. But definitely do... something related to it. Try some exercises to return her magic's vigor, perhaps? Another useless session of useless theorizing about the nature of the eclipse and its origin?
Or perhaps-
The trek alone through the jungle was dangerous in theory, but not in fact. Imogen possessed a dawnstone, an illumite shard of moderately unusual size taken from one of the Railrunners' storehouses shortly after the collapse of Zaichaer, but she didn't use it much. First, constant expenditure of a Dragonshard's power was unwise- though the stone was big enough to shine indefinitely, keeping it under control was still a constant, low-level strain at the back of the user's mind. Second, she had melded it with one of her Pact Weapons in a moment of experimentation months prior, and while she was entirely able to keep the staff manifest for days if needed, she was as yet unsure what kind of deleterious effect that might have on her soul in the eclipse's harsh light.
But there was another workaround in Animus, and she was presently stalking the woods with both concealed claws and a peculiar innovation of chimerism in the form of wings with feathers as hard as iron. Admittedly they were too heavy to fly, and difficult to maneuver, but they provided very effective shields against the various predators inhabiting the jungle, and as works of Animus rather than simple aetheric constructs, they required no access to magic to maintain.
(However, they were nigh-impossible to sleep with, and so she did have to wait for the moon to rise each night to be free of them.)
Imogen trod the forest without a clear destination in mind, though she wasn't surprised when she found herself back at the waterfall that she and Carina had discovered weeks prior. Shadow Eagle Cavern, they'd called the little hollow, both of them being tremendously gifted at the art of nomenclature, and once they'd figured out the nature of the place it was essentially harmless. The Sunsinger hesitated a moment before passing through the waterveil, wondering if perhaps the angle of the eclipse was right to wake the dangerous birds.
But if the sunlight was so weak and twisted that it prevented her from using her own runes, it followed that it would not do anything for the strange lumps of rock. The light on the darkness, the sound of the quiet rushing water... something in Imogen's soul told her that these things would help her meditate, help her connect to the depths of her own being and maybe glean some understanding of what was going on.
So the Sunsinger entered the cavern. Less than a minute later, she screamed in surprise.
Anna Carina Caron was in the middle of inventorying the current stock of food that Imogen and herself had been sharing when the other woman burst out of the jungle, looking as though she'd seen a ghost. And then also seen something spooky.
”Carina!” Imogen shouted, sounding no less perturbed than she looked, ”You're here! Quick, come with me to the cavern, you have to see something! You are not going to believe it!”
The two magic-less witches stood at the far edge of the chamber at the bottom of Shadow Eagle Cavern.
The chamber was fairly large, and roughly round, the waterfall from the unseen lake above encircling most of the upper wall around the two girls, and rushing over a series of rough protrusions coming out of the lower wall and floor. From their past experience, they knew that when the light of the sun shone upon those rocks, the Shadow Eagles would emerge, huge birds of prey which hunted nigh-invisibly.
Now, though, only the wan light of the eclipse poured in through the lake and the cavern, and where it touched those protrusions... it seemed to soak into them, filling them with a soft and oddly orange hue. And the shadows they cast did not form birds, but instead...
It was early morning in Ash, but in the southern latitude of Ecith, the sun still stood high in the sky. So did the moon. In the same place.
And this was driving Imogen Ward to madness.
There was nothing surprising in her negative reaction to the eclipse and its... side-effects, really. Firstly, Imogen had always identified herself with imagery of the sun. The ring which Carina had bought her bore a sun motif; her cabin on The Duck had made celestial reference. She had been initiated in the shadow of a great sun-motif'd rock, she had marked her smuggled goods with black suns. She was part of a militaristic cult called "the Sunsingers" and she did in fact meditate to the words of a sun-focused song, in fulfillment of all expectation thereof. Obviously it was a bit heartbreaking to have seen so little of the sun these past few days.
-except that none of that was it. Imogen had spent the last decade training as a witch, mastering the runes she had been granted to a degree seldom reached by practitioners, and had made them part of her life. She infused her body with the powers of animal kingdoms in day-to-day practice, for sheer convenience. She walked in strange places, utterly unbothered by the threat of any danger due primarily to her ever-present power to manifest an arbitrary number of enormous swords and skewer anyone and anything. Even her regular gait, while walking, had been improved in some miniscule fashion by the addition of the white lemur's tail to her ass.
And now, with minimal fanfare, this random celestial event had chosen to cut her connection to those powers as casually as a weaver snipped a loose thread.
So when the tenth day since the first eclipse dawned and the damned orb of bright-limned shadow still commanded the heavens, the Ork woman realized that she would need to do something. Not "something about it", to be clear; even with full access to her runes she couldn't do anything about the fucking firmament. But definitely do... something related to it. Try some exercises to return her magic's vigor, perhaps? Another useless session of useless theorizing about the nature of the eclipse and its origin?
Or perhaps-
~~~
The trek alone through the jungle was dangerous in theory, but not in fact. Imogen possessed a dawnstone, an illumite shard of moderately unusual size taken from one of the Railrunners' storehouses shortly after the collapse of Zaichaer, but she didn't use it much. First, constant expenditure of a Dragonshard's power was unwise- though the stone was big enough to shine indefinitely, keeping it under control was still a constant, low-level strain at the back of the user's mind. Second, she had melded it with one of her Pact Weapons in a moment of experimentation months prior, and while she was entirely able to keep the staff manifest for days if needed, she was as yet unsure what kind of deleterious effect that might have on her soul in the eclipse's harsh light.
But there was another workaround in Animus, and she was presently stalking the woods with both concealed claws and a peculiar innovation of chimerism in the form of wings with feathers as hard as iron. Admittedly they were too heavy to fly, and difficult to maneuver, but they provided very effective shields against the various predators inhabiting the jungle, and as works of Animus rather than simple aetheric constructs, they required no access to magic to maintain.
(However, they were nigh-impossible to sleep with, and so she did have to wait for the moon to rise each night to be free of them.)
Imogen trod the forest without a clear destination in mind, though she wasn't surprised when she found herself back at the waterfall that she and Carina had discovered weeks prior. Shadow Eagle Cavern, they'd called the little hollow, both of them being tremendously gifted at the art of nomenclature, and once they'd figured out the nature of the place it was essentially harmless. The Sunsinger hesitated a moment before passing through the waterveil, wondering if perhaps the angle of the eclipse was right to wake the dangerous birds.
But if the sunlight was so weak and twisted that it prevented her from using her own runes, it followed that it would not do anything for the strange lumps of rock. The light on the darkness, the sound of the quiet rushing water... something in Imogen's soul told her that these things would help her meditate, help her connect to the depths of her own being and maybe glean some understanding of what was going on.
So the Sunsinger entered the cavern. Less than a minute later, she screamed in surprise.
~~~
Anna Carina Caron was in the middle of inventorying the current stock of food that Imogen and herself had been sharing when the other woman burst out of the jungle, looking as though she'd seen a ghost. And then also seen something spooky.
”Carina!” Imogen shouted, sounding no less perturbed than she looked, ”You're here! Quick, come with me to the cavern, you have to see something! You are not going to believe it!”
~~~
The two magic-less witches stood at the far edge of the chamber at the bottom of Shadow Eagle Cavern.
The chamber was fairly large, and roughly round, the waterfall from the unseen lake above encircling most of the upper wall around the two girls, and rushing over a series of rough protrusions coming out of the lower wall and floor. From their past experience, they knew that when the light of the sun shone upon those rocks, the Shadow Eagles would emerge, huge birds of prey which hunted nigh-invisibly.
Now, though, only the wan light of the eclipse poured in through the lake and the cavern, and where it touched those protrusions... it seemed to soak into them, filling them with a soft and oddly orange hue. And the shadows they cast did not form birds, but instead...