Ash 65, 122
When the eclipse hit, Imogen had been on her way to do something.
It truly doesn’t matter what it was. The only important thing, really, was that she had been in transit, in the middle of some trip which was relatively short-range. A little surveying, a little gathering, the sorts of things which have to be done when you’re running a camp.
There was more to do in Zaichaer, of course, but there would be more to do there ad infinitium, ad aeternium; the destruction which had been wrought seemed to birth complications without end, like a great spider which is threatening by itself but becomes worse when it lays a thousand eggs in the corner of your home. There was more protection needed, more service to be done there than Imogen Ward could accomplish if she lived for a hundred Orkhan lifetimes.
No, the work would be there when she returned. For the time being, she needed to spend some time with Carina. Her friend had taken well to the tropical life, seemingly more content with living just off the beach than she had ever been living in the boarding-houses of Zaichaer or even the nice Kalzasi inn that Imogen kept coming back to. Imogen had volunteered herself to help build a more permanent camp, though her vaunted Orkhan strength and the powers of Animus had hardly been needed for that.
Southern Ecith was, quite frankly, a paradise. The weather was balmy, even in late Ash, and lightweight boughs from the edges of the jungle were quite capable of standing up to the occasional storms which blew off the ocean. The tents which Imogen had brought were easily repurposed into wraps for a makeshift roof and door, which could be secured against the blowing rain and rolled up to let the breeze in on nice days.
The nice part about returning from Kalzasi, too, was that it had given her a chance to bring back a minor pyrolyth, a cheap dragonshard which was nonetheless quite useful for heating the newly-insulated lean-to when the tempests did blow. She’d placed it in a little stone bowl surrounded by the sand, far enough away from the wooden poles that it should stand little chance of igniting anything.
Altogether, then, she found her vacation extremely pleasant. She was no trained hunter, but a combination of lemur-form and the ability to fire spears from a hundred paces away had made gathering food a relatively easy occupation.
(Actually, gathering the food was the easy part; she’d been taught basic cooking skills by her mother in the Sanctuaries, but had proven a poor student of the culinary arts. That was something of a theme for her early life, and she wished she could have instructed herself to pay more attention. Still, she’d purchased a quantity of salt, sugar and pepper in her latest outing, in the hopes that at least the existence of seasoning would offset her inexperience with transforming raw meat and fruit into something edible.)
But the putative reason they were there at all was not pleasure, but business, though that business was not wholly known to them. For that reason, Imogen had indulged her tendency to wander, taking flight on regular occasions to survey the region for any anomaly which might help to explain why The Duck had dumped them on this shore several months prior.
Thus it was when the sun rose black in the sky.
The Sunsinger was on the wing when the sun rose that day, in the fugue state of rest and minute adjustment which the albatross was so uniquely gifted. True to form, it took her some time to realize that something was awry with the dawn itself, and twilight had flooded the eastern sky before it occurred to her that the color of the world was wrong.
Once that hit, of course, the cause was obvious. Where the sun should stand, a dark sphere had risen in the sky, a blot surrounded by a vibrant corona of orange and red, staining the jungle and hills below in exotic shades. Below her, Imogen could hear the sounds of alarmed birdcalls, of rushing animals seeking cover, confused and unsure about the strangeness surrounding them.
Being a bit better-educated and well-reasoned than the average bird, Imogen quickly recognized the celestial event for an eclipse. Fear turned to marvel at the rare effect, and she wondered how it was that she’d heard no predictions of the eclipse back in the towns surrounding Zaichaer and Kalzasi.
Still, she knew full well that such things happened infrequently and did not last long. The witch sought a fair vantage point, a tall tree growing out of the side of a hill, and settled on it, observing serenely the orange-stained world beyond. It was, she thought to herself, really moments like this which helped imbue life with a sense of true wonder, a reflection of the childlike glee which appreciates everything in the world for what it is, not knowing whether it was common or rare and simply reveling in how it was all unique.
A few minutes later, it occurred to the resting albatross that the sun had fully crested the horizon, but the eclipse’s shadow had not lessened anywhere in her view.
How strange! The witch marveled to herself, keeping one eye on the reddish canopy as she lifted a wing to preen. The stories always describe these as very short. Is this some manner of sign?
Not impossible, certainly. She’d speculated freely that perhaps the destruction of Zaichaer had been some manner of divine retribution; perhaps the same deific powers had chosen to cast the land into shadow as an omen?
That would be an interesting question for the Temple of Galetira, but she had no particular desire to take a three-week detour to inquire with the oracles. And when it came to omens, it paid to leave things to the professionals; mercenaries and witch-mercenaries in particular were habitually prone to simply deciding that some omen or another was a sign and re-ordering their entire lives about it. This was one reason why her uncle had always advised her to avoid superstitious behavior. Even if you were right that something was an omen, you were probably in the dark about what it actually entailed.
Well, it didn’t much matter. Perhaps the eclipse would last the whole day. That would be a little hard on Imogen’s eyes, but otherwise no skin (or feathers) off her back. The affairs of the gods were best ignored, if you could get away with it.
To that end, Albagen took once more to the skies, flapping intensively to gain lift in absence of the seaborne thermals to which her body was adapted. She continued thus through the unnatural gloaming of the late morning, and around noontime she landed, and focused her energies on the Cardinal Rune of Animus to obtain a lemur form for the purposes of a ground search.
And nothing happened.
To be clear, Imogen had carried a Cardinal Rune for just six years of her life. That was well and truly enough to make it part of the fabric of herself, but not anything like enough to make her feel as though a lack of magic was truly crippling. Yes, of course, an Ork with access to limitless quantities of magical swords was a lot stronger than an Ork otherwise, but she wasn’t a witch who was easily driven to panic by that sort of thing.
On the other hand, the thought of being trapped forever in the form of, essentially, a gigantic seagull was pretty worrisome.
She hopped about a bit, trying to focus, to access the Rune’s power. She could still feel the reservoir of living energy within her aura, the sea within the soul, but it felt totally unresponsive to her will.
”Ah, shit. Shit, shit, shit, no, no, no.”
To any observers, it might have been a scene from a dream. The sea’s waves broke calmly on the shore in the middle distance, the muted calls of birds filtered through the branches above, and here, on the ground level, a large grey albatross hopped around in circles, swearing like a sailor.
She took off again before she had really recovered her reason, instinctively certain that a distracted bird hopping around on the ground at the jungle outskirts was just asking to be eaten… and would probably accomplish it, all things considered, if she couldn’t change back.
Wait- what of her pact weapons?
Albagen focused on the other rune, willing her sword forth. Again, nothing happened, her soul remained still in response to her will. Her runes simply did not function.
No, that couldn’t be true. That wasn’t how Cardinal Runes worked. They weren’t quite like a scrivener’s script, inflexible to a fault, but they were a little more than simple portholes for aether and will. She had spoken just then, which meant the magic she’d infused into the albatross totem upon transformation was still functioning properly… she just couldn’t seem to access it or change it.
In the air once more, veering over the ocean, Imogen fell back into meditation, trying to understand what was happening in her soul.
It wasn’t hard to link the effect to the eclipse, of course. The timing was right, though Imogen wasn’t sure of the precise moment the runes had failed. Yet she fancied she could actually feel the umber of the moon’s shadow on her, palpable with her eyes no longer distracting her mind.
What was an eclipse?
The moon passing before the sun, naturally. Ordinarily, they intersected briefly, often incompletely, but this one seemed determined to linger. And what did that symbolize?
Well, the sun was the source of light, of guidance. Men were made to rely upon it, to see the world in light and understand it as such. A shadow intersecting that light…? Perhaps it symbolized the blockage of divine guidance, of a lighthouse being dimmed in the middle of a storm.
If a cloud passed between the earth and the sun, the light was in no way diminished, but it did not reach the people below with the same intensity. A better analogy, perhaps- if she stood at one side of a valley and flashed a signal mirror to watchers on the other mountain, they could understand her meaning, but if a low fog was between them, the mirror’s light would never reach.
Perhaps, somehow, that was happening here in symbolic form. As the moon blocked vision of the sun, so did it block her vision of her own power?
She felt like that didn’t make a lot of sense. Animus, at least, drew no power from the sunlight. And again, a spell involving a day-long eclipse? That would take the power of a god, or an archmage performing a rite on a scale not seen since the Spire fell.
So what could she do about it? Well, nothing. She didn’t even know what was going on. The only thing to do was to continue flying.
So she did, through the endless liminal day-that-was-not, in the sky where the sea met the shore.
When the eclipse hit, Imogen had been on her way to do something.
It truly doesn’t matter what it was. The only important thing, really, was that she had been in transit, in the middle of some trip which was relatively short-range. A little surveying, a little gathering, the sorts of things which have to be done when you’re running a camp.
There was more to do in Zaichaer, of course, but there would be more to do there ad infinitium, ad aeternium; the destruction which had been wrought seemed to birth complications without end, like a great spider which is threatening by itself but becomes worse when it lays a thousand eggs in the corner of your home. There was more protection needed, more service to be done there than Imogen Ward could accomplish if she lived for a hundred Orkhan lifetimes.
No, the work would be there when she returned. For the time being, she needed to spend some time with Carina. Her friend had taken well to the tropical life, seemingly more content with living just off the beach than she had ever been living in the boarding-houses of Zaichaer or even the nice Kalzasi inn that Imogen kept coming back to. Imogen had volunteered herself to help build a more permanent camp, though her vaunted Orkhan strength and the powers of Animus had hardly been needed for that.
Southern Ecith was, quite frankly, a paradise. The weather was balmy, even in late Ash, and lightweight boughs from the edges of the jungle were quite capable of standing up to the occasional storms which blew off the ocean. The tents which Imogen had brought were easily repurposed into wraps for a makeshift roof and door, which could be secured against the blowing rain and rolled up to let the breeze in on nice days.
The nice part about returning from Kalzasi, too, was that it had given her a chance to bring back a minor pyrolyth, a cheap dragonshard which was nonetheless quite useful for heating the newly-insulated lean-to when the tempests did blow. She’d placed it in a little stone bowl surrounded by the sand, far enough away from the wooden poles that it should stand little chance of igniting anything.
Altogether, then, she found her vacation extremely pleasant. She was no trained hunter, but a combination of lemur-form and the ability to fire spears from a hundred paces away had made gathering food a relatively easy occupation.
(Actually, gathering the food was the easy part; she’d been taught basic cooking skills by her mother in the Sanctuaries, but had proven a poor student of the culinary arts. That was something of a theme for her early life, and she wished she could have instructed herself to pay more attention. Still, she’d purchased a quantity of salt, sugar and pepper in her latest outing, in the hopes that at least the existence of seasoning would offset her inexperience with transforming raw meat and fruit into something edible.)
But the putative reason they were there at all was not pleasure, but business, though that business was not wholly known to them. For that reason, Imogen had indulged her tendency to wander, taking flight on regular occasions to survey the region for any anomaly which might help to explain why The Duck had dumped them on this shore several months prior.
Thus it was when the sun rose black in the sky.
~~~
The Sunsinger was on the wing when the sun rose that day, in the fugue state of rest and minute adjustment which the albatross was so uniquely gifted. True to form, it took her some time to realize that something was awry with the dawn itself, and twilight had flooded the eastern sky before it occurred to her that the color of the world was wrong.
Once that hit, of course, the cause was obvious. Where the sun should stand, a dark sphere had risen in the sky, a blot surrounded by a vibrant corona of orange and red, staining the jungle and hills below in exotic shades. Below her, Imogen could hear the sounds of alarmed birdcalls, of rushing animals seeking cover, confused and unsure about the strangeness surrounding them.
Being a bit better-educated and well-reasoned than the average bird, Imogen quickly recognized the celestial event for an eclipse. Fear turned to marvel at the rare effect, and she wondered how it was that she’d heard no predictions of the eclipse back in the towns surrounding Zaichaer and Kalzasi.
Still, she knew full well that such things happened infrequently and did not last long. The witch sought a fair vantage point, a tall tree growing out of the side of a hill, and settled on it, observing serenely the orange-stained world beyond. It was, she thought to herself, really moments like this which helped imbue life with a sense of true wonder, a reflection of the childlike glee which appreciates everything in the world for what it is, not knowing whether it was common or rare and simply reveling in how it was all unique.
~~~
A few minutes later, it occurred to the resting albatross that the sun had fully crested the horizon, but the eclipse’s shadow had not lessened anywhere in her view.
How strange! The witch marveled to herself, keeping one eye on the reddish canopy as she lifted a wing to preen. The stories always describe these as very short. Is this some manner of sign?
Not impossible, certainly. She’d speculated freely that perhaps the destruction of Zaichaer had been some manner of divine retribution; perhaps the same deific powers had chosen to cast the land into shadow as an omen?
That would be an interesting question for the Temple of Galetira, but she had no particular desire to take a three-week detour to inquire with the oracles. And when it came to omens, it paid to leave things to the professionals; mercenaries and witch-mercenaries in particular were habitually prone to simply deciding that some omen or another was a sign and re-ordering their entire lives about it. This was one reason why her uncle had always advised her to avoid superstitious behavior. Even if you were right that something was an omen, you were probably in the dark about what it actually entailed.
Well, it didn’t much matter. Perhaps the eclipse would last the whole day. That would be a little hard on Imogen’s eyes, but otherwise no skin (or feathers) off her back. The affairs of the gods were best ignored, if you could get away with it.
To that end, Albagen took once more to the skies, flapping intensively to gain lift in absence of the seaborne thermals to which her body was adapted. She continued thus through the unnatural gloaming of the late morning, and around noontime she landed, and focused her energies on the Cardinal Rune of Animus to obtain a lemur form for the purposes of a ground search.
And nothing happened.
~~~
To be clear, Imogen had carried a Cardinal Rune for just six years of her life. That was well and truly enough to make it part of the fabric of herself, but not anything like enough to make her feel as though a lack of magic was truly crippling. Yes, of course, an Ork with access to limitless quantities of magical swords was a lot stronger than an Ork otherwise, but she wasn’t a witch who was easily driven to panic by that sort of thing.
On the other hand, the thought of being trapped forever in the form of, essentially, a gigantic seagull was pretty worrisome.
She hopped about a bit, trying to focus, to access the Rune’s power. She could still feel the reservoir of living energy within her aura, the sea within the soul, but it felt totally unresponsive to her will.
”Ah, shit. Shit, shit, shit, no, no, no.”
To any observers, it might have been a scene from a dream. The sea’s waves broke calmly on the shore in the middle distance, the muted calls of birds filtered through the branches above, and here, on the ground level, a large grey albatross hopped around in circles, swearing like a sailor.
She took off again before she had really recovered her reason, instinctively certain that a distracted bird hopping around on the ground at the jungle outskirts was just asking to be eaten… and would probably accomplish it, all things considered, if she couldn’t change back.
Wait- what of her pact weapons?
Albagen focused on the other rune, willing her sword forth. Again, nothing happened, her soul remained still in response to her will. Her runes simply did not function.
No, that couldn’t be true. That wasn’t how Cardinal Runes worked. They weren’t quite like a scrivener’s script, inflexible to a fault, but they were a little more than simple portholes for aether and will. She had spoken just then, which meant the magic she’d infused into the albatross totem upon transformation was still functioning properly… she just couldn’t seem to access it or change it.
In the air once more, veering over the ocean, Imogen fell back into meditation, trying to understand what was happening in her soul.
~~~
It wasn’t hard to link the effect to the eclipse, of course. The timing was right, though Imogen wasn’t sure of the precise moment the runes had failed. Yet she fancied she could actually feel the umber of the moon’s shadow on her, palpable with her eyes no longer distracting her mind.
What was an eclipse?
The moon passing before the sun, naturally. Ordinarily, they intersected briefly, often incompletely, but this one seemed determined to linger. And what did that symbolize?
Well, the sun was the source of light, of guidance. Men were made to rely upon it, to see the world in light and understand it as such. A shadow intersecting that light…? Perhaps it symbolized the blockage of divine guidance, of a lighthouse being dimmed in the middle of a storm.
If a cloud passed between the earth and the sun, the light was in no way diminished, but it did not reach the people below with the same intensity. A better analogy, perhaps- if she stood at one side of a valley and flashed a signal mirror to watchers on the other mountain, they could understand her meaning, but if a low fog was between them, the mirror’s light would never reach.
Perhaps, somehow, that was happening here in symbolic form. As the moon blocked vision of the sun, so did it block her vision of her own power?
She felt like that didn’t make a lot of sense. Animus, at least, drew no power from the sunlight. And again, a spell involving a day-long eclipse? That would take the power of a god, or an archmage performing a rite on a scale not seen since the Spire fell.
So what could she do about it? Well, nothing. She didn’t even know what was going on. The only thing to do was to continue flying.
So she did, through the endless liminal day-that-was-not, in the sky where the sea met the shore.