A Pointless Battle
Posted: Sat Nov 26, 2022 12:21 am
Ash 67, 122
There was darkness over the land, a great darkness.
Two days prior, Imogen Ward had been trapped in bird-form while flying over the jungles of Southern Ecith, caught as the sun had slumbered as ever in the night but failed to rise anew. There, bereft of power, access to her Runes shorn from her, she had been forced to confront the possibility that this dominion of darkness would simply swallow the land forever. The shadow which stained her soul and froze her effortless mastery of form seemed, in the first instant, all-compelling, all-conquering, invincible.
The sun had not risen since, not really. The horizon would grow red as it should, and light would begin to build, ready to sweep across the jungle canopies and distant mountains in a tide of glowing gold as it should… except that break never happened. Again and again, that malevolent circle of red-and-black stained the horizon instead, lifting slowly to light the world but poorly. And just as it had at the start, that strange shadow seemed to sap from Imogen the power to actually control the Runes which she had spent most of her adult life training and cultivating and mastering perforce. It was bleak.
Yet she had not been without access to her magic for most of that time. Actually, that’s precisely the horns of the conundrum on which she found herself uncomfortably sat one late Ash afternoon, if you could call it “afternoon” when noon had never truly come.
The Orkhan girl sat in the camp she had shared with Carina for most of the season (save her occasional trips to Kalzasi), and pondered the golden light which illuminated her surroundings. It was sunlight, pure and true, and it was ever-so-slowly killing the young witch.
When the moon ascended the sky that first night, Imogen had found the shadow’s grasp of her form grow weak and tenuous. Having returned to the campsite some hours before, she wasted no time in resculpting herself back into her proper form. She then wasted some time crying in relief, hugging herself.
(Do not judge her too harshly, unless you have yourself faced the threat of life as a huge seagull which eats mostly garbage.)
She’d had a brief discussion with the other mages present, but needn’t have bothered. The fact that the suppressant effect was linked to the celestial disconcordance was evident to anyone with eyes and a working neck. As the night moved on and the moon tracked towards its nadir, it seemed possible that the eclipse might have been a one-time affair, a single day of darkness of stress caused by some vast cosmological accident and no greater impact on the world writ large.
But a witch who hoped for the best must still prepare for the worst, so–at Carina’s suggestion–Imogen manifest her pact-staff, tipped with brilliant sunstone, before the moon’s silver light had vanished from the sky. When the day came, the inky eclipse returned; but as they had theorized, the illumite’s radiant glow seemed to ward away whatever cosmic mechanism was quashing their Runes.
The area of the stone’s effect was proportionate to the stone’s size, but Imogen required only a small nimbus of light to keep her own powers active, restoring to her a great deal of strength and confidence both. Not for the first time, Imogen silently blessed whichever of Fianci Heron’s agents had stashed the rare stone beneath the Pfenning four months prior. Truly, crime not only paid, it had remarkable benefits for the community at large!
From that happy coincidence, the problem emerged. Imogen had melded the stolen (and re-stolen) sunstone to her pact weapon, which meant that she could produce the necessary light only so long as her staff was of her flesh and not of her spirit, as it were. If she dematerialized the weapon, she was going to be absolutely powerless to resummon it until the next moon scattered silvery light across the jungle floor again.
Maintaining a materialized pact weapon was, truly, one of the least aether-intensive spells imaginable. And Sunsingers, who could be assured of no weapons or allies except the ones they kept in their own hearts, trained extensively to maintain such manifestations for long periods of time. Although the pain a dematerialized pact weapon would inflict on its weilder grew over time, as long as the weapon was not long in combat the divergence it inflicted on its return should not grow too unbearable. So, then, what was the issue?
First: Imogen was not doing nothing with the staff. For over a day now, she had maintained the connection between her spirit and the Sunstone in order to coax forth the light which flowed endlessly forth. Had the sunstone been discrete, she could have bothered Avamande to scriven a working which would keep it lit, but the fact that it was integrated into her own anima complicated such a thing endlessly.
Second: the monsters.
The Sunsinger meditated, her mind’s eye filled with void and light. Behind her closed eyes, she envisioned an orb atop a great tower, or perhaps a tree, one of the deciduous trees which reached up for a hundred feet of barren bark before finally erupting into a crown of leaves.
In her mind, she sat at the foot of the tree, meditating. In her meditation, she envisioned a light atop a tall lighthouse, a tall and dark tower, shining out across the misty bay as a signal to ships: land ho! Beware!
In her mind within her mind, she sat at the foot of the tower, meditating. In her meditation, she envisioned a flame atop a tall candle, a veritable spire of wax which dwarfed buildings and filled the air with the soft scent of hot throw, tossed into the air by the great flame far above, but settling on the surroundings like a blanket.
In her mind within her mind within her mind, she sat at the foot of the candle, me-
The sound of rustling bushes broke her endlessly self-referential self-reverie. One possible disadvantage of this focusing technique, taught to her by her old Master years ago, was that one could become lost in the image. Indeed, that was nearly the point- but with many hours of devoted practice, Imogen Ward had become exceedingly good at allowing unexpected stimuli to rouse her. Thus, the technique to save both sleep and aether could be employed even in a dangerous situation.
The sunsinger opened her eyes, and immediately discerned a shape in the darkness. In Carina’s camp, she had placed her staff upon a central rock, almost like a plinth, and driven it through the stone just enough that it could stand upright without energy. The sunstone at its crown glowed softly, just bright enough to encompass the entire camp.
At the edge of the light, something stalked. Whatever else it might be, it was enormous, easily ten feet tall, and longer than that. It walked on four legs, its padding feet too soft to create audible steps in the sand, and shrouded in shadow. She got the impression of a great cat, like a leopard, but it was impossible to make out any details in the shadows.
Or rather, there were no such details, and it was “the shadows.” It circled her camp as the Liar-beast had done last year, in the north, but its eyes (if eyes it had) reflected nothing.
”Are you sure you want to do this?” Imogen inquired, ”You can see the sunlight. You must know you can die. As soon as you cross the gloaming threshold, my spear will pierce your hide and the fire will unravel you.”
The shadow creature did not respond. They never did. The witch wasn’t sure if they were sentient, or sapient, or even as alive as the undead. They weren’t like the elemental beasts she’d observed so carefully throughout Southern Ecith; not animals merged with shadow. They were just living shadow, and apparently invulnerable- unless given definition by sunlight.
(That reminded her of nothing so much as the Shadow Eagles, of course, but those did not even seem to exist without illumination. These could absolutely kill you in the dark.)
Though the creature did not answer, she heard the sounds of other beasts in the shadows across the other sides of the camp. Snapping twigs, rushing sands; it seemed like an entire pack had found them. Not ideal, not when she was doing everything she could to conserve her waning powers.
”Fine.” the Ork said at last, her voice harsher than she meant, ”Come on, then, let’s be lively about it.”
The shadows seemed to accord with her words. Almost at once, the huge cat (so she would think of it) rushed into the camp, seeming almost to deform and tear at the golden nimbus of sunlight filling it. It barrelled towards her, so large and indistinct as to seem more like an aggressive force than any manner of creature.
Imogen was good as her word, and did not even move. Instead, her gigantic golden partisan materialized five feet in the night air above the creature, blazing with argent light, and blasted downwards in the same instant. The spear pierced the cat’s skull in nearly the same instant it had come into existence, pinning the shadow beast to the ground and causing the force of inertia to flip it end-over-end.
Before the tumbling corpse could reach the Sunsinger, her magic had torn it apart. Spellbreaker Nova-fire was an aggressive antagonist against many forms of hostile magecraft, but seemed especially opposed to the shadow beasts, which Imogen suspected were not made of traditional matter or flesh at all.
There was no time for thinking, however. The Ork stood, reaching out her hand to grasp at nothingness in front of her- but as her fingers closed, matter erupted from the void, her seven-foot long blade blossoming into being in a rush of silver fire. As her hand wrapped around the familiar handle, she turned, blindly swinging towards the cat she knew would be trying to ambush her from the rear.
Her prediction was right, but the timing was off. The tip of her sword barely scored the side of the cat’s cheek, the painful anti-magic causing a rush of fire and forcing the beast to change course, hurtling past Imogen’s flank.
For another combatant, that might have been the moment she turned to look for other enemies; after all, the cat which had just missed her would be distracted by the cut and near-miss for several seconds, valuable time to ascertain the battlefield. Imogen did not buy into that strategy. As far as she was concerned, the best time to kill an enemy was right when they’d attacked. To that end, she drew her sword back above her opposite shoulder, then whipped her arm around at incredible speed, releasing her hold on the sword and sending it flying, end-over-end, after the cat.
Her sword slammed into the cat’s side, knocking the behemoth over and bringing forth more silvery flames across its flesh. Even free of Imogen’s arm, however, the blade was possessed of a wicked killing intent, and it swung itself across the cat’s broad flank, tearing apart shadow until the entire beast gave up the ghost and melted into umbral mush, which swiftly disappeared.
The Ork knew the rhythms and flow of battle, and understood that the time she’d spent killing the cat would certainly mean that another would take the opportunity to strike. As soon as she released the greatsword, she crossed her arms behind her and brought forth her final weapon- her pact shield. The enormous round shield materialized already-braced against her arms, but when the next cat hit it still hit with enough force to bowl the witch over.
That was fine by Imogen, who would rather be lying on the ground under ten pounds of steel and frame than with her spine severed. With an act of will, she forced her shield upwards telekinetically, pushing the unseen cat off of her and allowing her to roll onto her back and get a good look at the indistinct monster, which was pressed against her shield, trying to reach around it to get claws in her exposed belly.
She cast her right arm to her side, and recalled the spear, which was still stuck in the ground after the surprise attack which had killed the first cat. It tore itself from the sand and rolled rapidly to her open palm; as soon as she felt the shaft touch her skin, she snatched it up and drove at the cat above her, the weapon piercing the shadow-wraith’s soft underbelly and tearing its spine open. Its head began to lull almost immediately, and it quickly began to fade from being.
All three cats dead, Imogen’s quick surveys of the campsite could find no other monsters. She waited for nearly a full minute, motionless on the ground, watching for any unnatural shifting among the shadows outside the camp, or the telltale sounds which had alerted her to these predators in the first place.
But there was only shadow, and there was only silence.
The Ork rose to a seated position, exhaling slowly to bring her heartrate back to rest and quiet the rushing blood in her ears. Something dripped past her eye, and she dabbed at it with two fingers before realizing that it was her own blood. She traced the thin cut across her forehead; it seemed that the last cat had gotten very close to achieving all of its brethren’s aims at once.
There was a natural instinct to panic at the realization that she had just escaped death by (literally) an inch, but she did not indulge it. Instead, she returned to meditation and assumed the Sanctuary stance, dispelling her weapons one by one.
Exhausted physically and spiritually, Imogen nearly made the mistake of dismissing every weapon, but stopped just before she accidentally banished her staff and guarding sunlight both. She opened her eyes again to stare at the sun-tipped staff in the camp clearing’s center, shining like nothing had happened at all.
”...just got to hold on until the next moonrise.” Imogen muttered to herself. She wondered when that was.
She hoped it was soon.
There was darkness over the land, a great darkness.
Two days prior, Imogen Ward had been trapped in bird-form while flying over the jungles of Southern Ecith, caught as the sun had slumbered as ever in the night but failed to rise anew. There, bereft of power, access to her Runes shorn from her, she had been forced to confront the possibility that this dominion of darkness would simply swallow the land forever. The shadow which stained her soul and froze her effortless mastery of form seemed, in the first instant, all-compelling, all-conquering, invincible.
The sun had not risen since, not really. The horizon would grow red as it should, and light would begin to build, ready to sweep across the jungle canopies and distant mountains in a tide of glowing gold as it should… except that break never happened. Again and again, that malevolent circle of red-and-black stained the horizon instead, lifting slowly to light the world but poorly. And just as it had at the start, that strange shadow seemed to sap from Imogen the power to actually control the Runes which she had spent most of her adult life training and cultivating and mastering perforce. It was bleak.
Yet she had not been without access to her magic for most of that time. Actually, that’s precisely the horns of the conundrum on which she found herself uncomfortably sat one late Ash afternoon, if you could call it “afternoon” when noon had never truly come.
The Orkhan girl sat in the camp she had shared with Carina for most of the season (save her occasional trips to Kalzasi), and pondered the golden light which illuminated her surroundings. It was sunlight, pure and true, and it was ever-so-slowly killing the young witch.
~~~
When the moon ascended the sky that first night, Imogen had found the shadow’s grasp of her form grow weak and tenuous. Having returned to the campsite some hours before, she wasted no time in resculpting herself back into her proper form. She then wasted some time crying in relief, hugging herself.
(Do not judge her too harshly, unless you have yourself faced the threat of life as a huge seagull which eats mostly garbage.)
She’d had a brief discussion with the other mages present, but needn’t have bothered. The fact that the suppressant effect was linked to the celestial disconcordance was evident to anyone with eyes and a working neck. As the night moved on and the moon tracked towards its nadir, it seemed possible that the eclipse might have been a one-time affair, a single day of darkness of stress caused by some vast cosmological accident and no greater impact on the world writ large.
But a witch who hoped for the best must still prepare for the worst, so–at Carina’s suggestion–Imogen manifest her pact-staff, tipped with brilliant sunstone, before the moon’s silver light had vanished from the sky. When the day came, the inky eclipse returned; but as they had theorized, the illumite’s radiant glow seemed to ward away whatever cosmic mechanism was quashing their Runes.
The area of the stone’s effect was proportionate to the stone’s size, but Imogen required only a small nimbus of light to keep her own powers active, restoring to her a great deal of strength and confidence both. Not for the first time, Imogen silently blessed whichever of Fianci Heron’s agents had stashed the rare stone beneath the Pfenning four months prior. Truly, crime not only paid, it had remarkable benefits for the community at large!
From that happy coincidence, the problem emerged. Imogen had melded the stolen (and re-stolen) sunstone to her pact weapon, which meant that she could produce the necessary light only so long as her staff was of her flesh and not of her spirit, as it were. If she dematerialized the weapon, she was going to be absolutely powerless to resummon it until the next moon scattered silvery light across the jungle floor again.
Maintaining a materialized pact weapon was, truly, one of the least aether-intensive spells imaginable. And Sunsingers, who could be assured of no weapons or allies except the ones they kept in their own hearts, trained extensively to maintain such manifestations for long periods of time. Although the pain a dematerialized pact weapon would inflict on its weilder grew over time, as long as the weapon was not long in combat the divergence it inflicted on its return should not grow too unbearable. So, then, what was the issue?
First: Imogen was not doing nothing with the staff. For over a day now, she had maintained the connection between her spirit and the Sunstone in order to coax forth the light which flowed endlessly forth. Had the sunstone been discrete, she could have bothered Avamande to scriven a working which would keep it lit, but the fact that it was integrated into her own anima complicated such a thing endlessly.
Second: the monsters.
~~~
The Sunsinger meditated, her mind’s eye filled with void and light. Behind her closed eyes, she envisioned an orb atop a great tower, or perhaps a tree, one of the deciduous trees which reached up for a hundred feet of barren bark before finally erupting into a crown of leaves.
In her mind, she sat at the foot of the tree, meditating. In her meditation, she envisioned a light atop a tall lighthouse, a tall and dark tower, shining out across the misty bay as a signal to ships: land ho! Beware!
In her mind within her mind, she sat at the foot of the tower, meditating. In her meditation, she envisioned a flame atop a tall candle, a veritable spire of wax which dwarfed buildings and filled the air with the soft scent of hot throw, tossed into the air by the great flame far above, but settling on the surroundings like a blanket.
In her mind within her mind within her mind, she sat at the foot of the candle, me-
The sound of rustling bushes broke her endlessly self-referential self-reverie. One possible disadvantage of this focusing technique, taught to her by her old Master years ago, was that one could become lost in the image. Indeed, that was nearly the point- but with many hours of devoted practice, Imogen Ward had become exceedingly good at allowing unexpected stimuli to rouse her. Thus, the technique to save both sleep and aether could be employed even in a dangerous situation.
The sunsinger opened her eyes, and immediately discerned a shape in the darkness. In Carina’s camp, she had placed her staff upon a central rock, almost like a plinth, and driven it through the stone just enough that it could stand upright without energy. The sunstone at its crown glowed softly, just bright enough to encompass the entire camp.
At the edge of the light, something stalked. Whatever else it might be, it was enormous, easily ten feet tall, and longer than that. It walked on four legs, its padding feet too soft to create audible steps in the sand, and shrouded in shadow. She got the impression of a great cat, like a leopard, but it was impossible to make out any details in the shadows.
Or rather, there were no such details, and it was “the shadows.” It circled her camp as the Liar-beast had done last year, in the north, but its eyes (if eyes it had) reflected nothing.
”Are you sure you want to do this?” Imogen inquired, ”You can see the sunlight. You must know you can die. As soon as you cross the gloaming threshold, my spear will pierce your hide and the fire will unravel you.”
The shadow creature did not respond. They never did. The witch wasn’t sure if they were sentient, or sapient, or even as alive as the undead. They weren’t like the elemental beasts she’d observed so carefully throughout Southern Ecith; not animals merged with shadow. They were just living shadow, and apparently invulnerable- unless given definition by sunlight.
(That reminded her of nothing so much as the Shadow Eagles, of course, but those did not even seem to exist without illumination. These could absolutely kill you in the dark.)
Though the creature did not answer, she heard the sounds of other beasts in the shadows across the other sides of the camp. Snapping twigs, rushing sands; it seemed like an entire pack had found them. Not ideal, not when she was doing everything she could to conserve her waning powers.
”Fine.” the Ork said at last, her voice harsher than she meant, ”Come on, then, let’s be lively about it.”
The shadows seemed to accord with her words. Almost at once, the huge cat (so she would think of it) rushed into the camp, seeming almost to deform and tear at the golden nimbus of sunlight filling it. It barrelled towards her, so large and indistinct as to seem more like an aggressive force than any manner of creature.
Imogen was good as her word, and did not even move. Instead, her gigantic golden partisan materialized five feet in the night air above the creature, blazing with argent light, and blasted downwards in the same instant. The spear pierced the cat’s skull in nearly the same instant it had come into existence, pinning the shadow beast to the ground and causing the force of inertia to flip it end-over-end.
Before the tumbling corpse could reach the Sunsinger, her magic had torn it apart. Spellbreaker Nova-fire was an aggressive antagonist against many forms of hostile magecraft, but seemed especially opposed to the shadow beasts, which Imogen suspected were not made of traditional matter or flesh at all.
There was no time for thinking, however. The Ork stood, reaching out her hand to grasp at nothingness in front of her- but as her fingers closed, matter erupted from the void, her seven-foot long blade blossoming into being in a rush of silver fire. As her hand wrapped around the familiar handle, she turned, blindly swinging towards the cat she knew would be trying to ambush her from the rear.
Her prediction was right, but the timing was off. The tip of her sword barely scored the side of the cat’s cheek, the painful anti-magic causing a rush of fire and forcing the beast to change course, hurtling past Imogen’s flank.
For another combatant, that might have been the moment she turned to look for other enemies; after all, the cat which had just missed her would be distracted by the cut and near-miss for several seconds, valuable time to ascertain the battlefield. Imogen did not buy into that strategy. As far as she was concerned, the best time to kill an enemy was right when they’d attacked. To that end, she drew her sword back above her opposite shoulder, then whipped her arm around at incredible speed, releasing her hold on the sword and sending it flying, end-over-end, after the cat.
Her sword slammed into the cat’s side, knocking the behemoth over and bringing forth more silvery flames across its flesh. Even free of Imogen’s arm, however, the blade was possessed of a wicked killing intent, and it swung itself across the cat’s broad flank, tearing apart shadow until the entire beast gave up the ghost and melted into umbral mush, which swiftly disappeared.
The Ork knew the rhythms and flow of battle, and understood that the time she’d spent killing the cat would certainly mean that another would take the opportunity to strike. As soon as she released the greatsword, she crossed her arms behind her and brought forth her final weapon- her pact shield. The enormous round shield materialized already-braced against her arms, but when the next cat hit it still hit with enough force to bowl the witch over.
That was fine by Imogen, who would rather be lying on the ground under ten pounds of steel and frame than with her spine severed. With an act of will, she forced her shield upwards telekinetically, pushing the unseen cat off of her and allowing her to roll onto her back and get a good look at the indistinct monster, which was pressed against her shield, trying to reach around it to get claws in her exposed belly.
She cast her right arm to her side, and recalled the spear, which was still stuck in the ground after the surprise attack which had killed the first cat. It tore itself from the sand and rolled rapidly to her open palm; as soon as she felt the shaft touch her skin, she snatched it up and drove at the cat above her, the weapon piercing the shadow-wraith’s soft underbelly and tearing its spine open. Its head began to lull almost immediately, and it quickly began to fade from being.
All three cats dead, Imogen’s quick surveys of the campsite could find no other monsters. She waited for nearly a full minute, motionless on the ground, watching for any unnatural shifting among the shadows outside the camp, or the telltale sounds which had alerted her to these predators in the first place.
But there was only shadow, and there was only silence.
The Ork rose to a seated position, exhaling slowly to bring her heartrate back to rest and quiet the rushing blood in her ears. Something dripped past her eye, and she dabbed at it with two fingers before realizing that it was her own blood. She traced the thin cut across her forehead; it seemed that the last cat had gotten very close to achieving all of its brethren’s aims at once.
There was a natural instinct to panic at the realization that she had just escaped death by (literally) an inch, but she did not indulge it. Instead, she returned to meditation and assumed the Sanctuary stance, dispelling her weapons one by one.
Exhausted physically and spiritually, Imogen nearly made the mistake of dismissing every weapon, but stopped just before she accidentally banished her staff and guarding sunlight both. She opened her eyes again to stare at the sun-tipped staff in the camp clearing’s center, shining like nothing had happened at all.
”...just got to hold on until the next moonrise.” Imogen muttered to herself. She wondered when that was.
She hoped it was soon.