Frost 72, 122
In Imogen’s dreams, there was a dark and wretched waste.
It was in Southern Ecith; she knew this immediately, instinctively, as though it could be nowhere else. The knowledge itself was strange, but the mechanism was familiar enough. In the depths of her soul, she could feel the shining band left behind by the strange metal tapir months prior. Undoubtedly, this was the work of one of the metal spirits.
"Surely this isn’t caused by my boys" Imogen said hopefully into the void, voice almost pleading, "They’re good now."
No response, not that she expected one. She’d killed several of the shadow-tainted jaguars before finally undertaking the weeks-long project of organizing and scaring them into submission, but once they’d settled down, she found she had a soft spot for them. She’d even snuck back to the forest to visit some of the cats, and it certainly seemed like they’d taken her command to become lazy to heart.
The metal spirits didn’t seem particularly good at conversation, but it wasn’t a real question- the plain she was looking at right now was not the work of jaguars, nor any other creature of the jungle. There was no grass, and the patina of moss reaching across the strangely pitted plain of dirt and grey rock was sickly. Were it not for her mystical instinct, she might have guessed that the sight was from the curse-blasted clockwork wastes.
"Fair enough." said the witch, "But what do you expect me to do about it?"
The answer came to her as she woke, and it wasn’t at all helpful.
Fix this.
~~~
It took a while for Imogen to get around to it, but she did.
Part of it was the other matters she’d had to attend to. Correspondence with Iselya on the question of Exathun’s demand, of course, but she’d also spent much of Frost taking paying jobs around Kalzasi in the hopes of avoiding the Treasurer’s ultimatum. Much as she might sympathize with the beleaguered metal spirits of Ecith, they didn’t pay very well.
(Actually, she hadn’t considered the thought of asking for remuneration- but perhaps the idea wasn’t that crazy? After all, metals were precious. If they could point her in the direction of a gold deposit…)
Still, diligence was the trademark virtue of the Sunsingers, and the witch’s already-formidable time management skills had only been bolstered by Carina’s gift at the start of Frost. Though she wasn’t taking to Traversion with quite the same shocking speed as she had Animus, she no longer felt the need to constrain her travel with the kind of ritual she’d used to track down the first shadow jaguar.
So it was, one bright afternoon in early Glade, that a sword split the air apart on the edge of the jungle waste, and Imogen Ward stepped out.
The waste looked much like it had in her dream. The jungle petered slowly out; trees gave way to shrubs, shrubs to grass and creepers, then to moss, then to nothing but pitted, chalky stone. Further examination in the cold light of consciousness, however, demonstrated that it went further- the plants and trees at the very edge of the forest were visibly withered and degraded, even though trees just a few meters further in were fine.
The ork stepped out into the wasteland, frowning. It looked a lot like a curse. Maybe even worse than that. She could recall discussing dragonshards with Angela years ago after her first unguarded trip through the Warrens, when the young Kindred had told her and Carina horror stories about Voidrillium poisoning. The dark, decaying landscape certainly seemed like the other witch’s story come to life.
…well, she couldn’t feel anything, but that told her nothing. It was possible that the void’s attainted power was surrounding her now, but spread too thin to be noticeable without years of exposure. Imogen wasn’t willing to trust her life to that alone.
Thankfully, she was a witch- and what’s more, a witch who had been training with a very accomplished sorcerer in the past year. She knelt on the forest floor and produced a thin strip of parchment, which she laid out carefully on the driest rock she could locate. The ork nudged a pack around from her back towards her side, opening it and pulling out a small rock vial, polished to a sheen. She unscrewed the cap, to which a thin brush was already attached, and swirled the scrivening ink inside around before lifting it carefully to the paper.
With intense focus, sweat beading on her brow, Imogen drew a series of simple runes across the long strip, connecting each one via a curved line. When the dragonshard-infused ink covered much of the paper, she carefully screwed the cap back into the vial, then reached down and touched one of the inked runes with a single fingernail. After a moment’s hesitation, the pattern began to glow with a quiet magic.
Imogen grinned. It was a simple sigil–maybe THE simplest sigil–but it would serve in a pinch. With the circuits connected, the simple scrivening created a basic and very fragile flow of power. If she were to move into an area subject to Voidrillium corruption, or some other type of entropic curse, the scrivening would break long before the ambient energy became a risk to her.
Thus protected, the witch wrapped the parchment around one arm, tying it off with the ends (which bore no glowing ink), and set off into the wastes ahead.
~~~
Imogen had been walking for about twenty minutes when she noticed that her arms were beginning to shake.
Her talisman was still glowing strong, not even flickering, but she could not shake the feeling in the air that something was desperately wrong. The Ork eyed her scrivening, looking for any tears in the luminescent design, but nothing seemed awry.
A few minutes later, however, Imogen was forced to stop as a wave of nausea passed through her. She leaned forward, hands on her knees as she fought with the feeling, breathing hard. She noticed again that her arms had begun twitching.
The witch looked at the talisman again. Still fine. She resolved to proceed- she wasn’t about to let mere nerves overcome her.
This time, though, she only got a few more meters before she was forced to her knees, where she noisily threw up.
Head spinning, panting, Imogen let out another deep breath… and disappeared.
~~~
The Ork spent about four hours resting in the bole of a tree, just shy of the treeline marking the entry to the wastelands. Her talisman had lost its charge by that point, but she’d watched it to the bitter end; not a flicker. Whatever was killing the plants here, it wasn’t any sort of void or chaotic magic.
She supposed that made sense. She’d sort of forgotten this in her contemplations, but she had been dispatched here by a metal spirit. Whatever was going on here surely concerned that element chiefly.
Well, fine. If it was a physical force which was preventing her approach, then that opened another option. It wasn’t one which Imogen was excited about, but she did pride herself on her lateral thinking.
Once she’d recovered to the point where her stomach no longer ached and she didn’t feel like she was in any physical danger of death, Imogen invoked the powers of the Cardinal Rune of Traversion and stood- stepping right out of her body resting below.
"Guard that." Said the witch, her voice echoing through the astral realm. She wasn’t totally sure if anything in the living realm could hear her, but she didn’t need it to- with a wash of shimmering silver light, her trusty zweihander materialized out of the air, leaning against the tree next to her. Unless she was phenomenally unfortunate today, it would be sufficient to ward off any of the jungle’s ordinary threats.
That formality satisfied, Imogen began making her way across the blasted lands once more. Unbound from space, her ghostly body moved at a rapid clip, flickering across the landscape. She might even have been briefly and eerily visible in spectral form if there were any mortal watchers in that cursed heath, which there weren’t.
It wasn’t long before Imogen detected a gradual downward slope in her floating gait, and stopped to take stock of the material world. Here, it seemed, there was a great caldera of sorts, a large and gently-sloping land leading down to a nadir. She knelt for a moment to inspect the rocks, though she could not touch them.
They didn’t look volcanic. What was going on?
As Imogen had expected, there was a mound of rock and dirt collecting at the crater’s center point; mostly dirt. If she’d been here in body it would have been too much to dig through, but dirt and rock alike posed no barrier to her spirit form.
Phasing through the dirt was an obnoxious proposition, largely because each descent buried her senses in dark softness, and no matter where she moved, nothing seemed to change. Were it not for the map of Slipspace always in her mind, she would have had no landmarks at all to search through. With some basic deductions and a grid search, however, Imoghost Ward soon found the hollow she’d been hoping for.
The cavern beneath the crater was not extensive, but it was… well… cavernous. Wide and twisty in turns, and illuminated above by light pouring through hidden holes she had not noticed on her trek down.
Thankfully, once within the cave, the problem was extraordinarily obvious.
A huge, round, squat boulder lay in the middle of the cavern. At first, it seemed like it was lit from within, but careful observation revealed that the boulder was rather surrounded by a nimbus of glowing dust. That wasn’t all, though; long, black, shiny bars of unidentifiable metal protruded outward in a halo around the rock. Imogen believed them affixed in place, but soon noticed that they were actually drifting slowly about the boulder in an unclear pattern.
No doubt this rock was the cause of the wasting in this region. You didn’t just find an eerie, threatening magic boulder which looked like it had crashed down from the heavens, surrounded by a ten-mile radius of death, and conclude anything else.
It was this rock for sure. The only problem was…
"What the fuck is this."
In Imogen’s dreams, there was a dark and wretched waste.
It was in Southern Ecith; she knew this immediately, instinctively, as though it could be nowhere else. The knowledge itself was strange, but the mechanism was familiar enough. In the depths of her soul, she could feel the shining band left behind by the strange metal tapir months prior. Undoubtedly, this was the work of one of the metal spirits.
"Surely this isn’t caused by my boys" Imogen said hopefully into the void, voice almost pleading, "They’re good now."
No response, not that she expected one. She’d killed several of the shadow-tainted jaguars before finally undertaking the weeks-long project of organizing and scaring them into submission, but once they’d settled down, she found she had a soft spot for them. She’d even snuck back to the forest to visit some of the cats, and it certainly seemed like they’d taken her command to become lazy to heart.
The metal spirits didn’t seem particularly good at conversation, but it wasn’t a real question- the plain she was looking at right now was not the work of jaguars, nor any other creature of the jungle. There was no grass, and the patina of moss reaching across the strangely pitted plain of dirt and grey rock was sickly. Were it not for her mystical instinct, she might have guessed that the sight was from the curse-blasted clockwork wastes.
"Fair enough." said the witch, "But what do you expect me to do about it?"
The answer came to her as she woke, and it wasn’t at all helpful.
Fix this.
~~~
It took a while for Imogen to get around to it, but she did.
Part of it was the other matters she’d had to attend to. Correspondence with Iselya on the question of Exathun’s demand, of course, but she’d also spent much of Frost taking paying jobs around Kalzasi in the hopes of avoiding the Treasurer’s ultimatum. Much as she might sympathize with the beleaguered metal spirits of Ecith, they didn’t pay very well.
(Actually, she hadn’t considered the thought of asking for remuneration- but perhaps the idea wasn’t that crazy? After all, metals were precious. If they could point her in the direction of a gold deposit…)
Still, diligence was the trademark virtue of the Sunsingers, and the witch’s already-formidable time management skills had only been bolstered by Carina’s gift at the start of Frost. Though she wasn’t taking to Traversion with quite the same shocking speed as she had Animus, she no longer felt the need to constrain her travel with the kind of ritual she’d used to track down the first shadow jaguar.
So it was, one bright afternoon in early Glade, that a sword split the air apart on the edge of the jungle waste, and Imogen Ward stepped out.
The waste looked much like it had in her dream. The jungle petered slowly out; trees gave way to shrubs, shrubs to grass and creepers, then to moss, then to nothing but pitted, chalky stone. Further examination in the cold light of consciousness, however, demonstrated that it went further- the plants and trees at the very edge of the forest were visibly withered and degraded, even though trees just a few meters further in were fine.
The ork stepped out into the wasteland, frowning. It looked a lot like a curse. Maybe even worse than that. She could recall discussing dragonshards with Angela years ago after her first unguarded trip through the Warrens, when the young Kindred had told her and Carina horror stories about Voidrillium poisoning. The dark, decaying landscape certainly seemed like the other witch’s story come to life.
…well, she couldn’t feel anything, but that told her nothing. It was possible that the void’s attainted power was surrounding her now, but spread too thin to be noticeable without years of exposure. Imogen wasn’t willing to trust her life to that alone.
Thankfully, she was a witch- and what’s more, a witch who had been training with a very accomplished sorcerer in the past year. She knelt on the forest floor and produced a thin strip of parchment, which she laid out carefully on the driest rock she could locate. The ork nudged a pack around from her back towards her side, opening it and pulling out a small rock vial, polished to a sheen. She unscrewed the cap, to which a thin brush was already attached, and swirled the scrivening ink inside around before lifting it carefully to the paper.
With intense focus, sweat beading on her brow, Imogen drew a series of simple runes across the long strip, connecting each one via a curved line. When the dragonshard-infused ink covered much of the paper, she carefully screwed the cap back into the vial, then reached down and touched one of the inked runes with a single fingernail. After a moment’s hesitation, the pattern began to glow with a quiet magic.
Imogen grinned. It was a simple sigil–maybe THE simplest sigil–but it would serve in a pinch. With the circuits connected, the simple scrivening created a basic and very fragile flow of power. If she were to move into an area subject to Voidrillium corruption, or some other type of entropic curse, the scrivening would break long before the ambient energy became a risk to her.
Thus protected, the witch wrapped the parchment around one arm, tying it off with the ends (which bore no glowing ink), and set off into the wastes ahead.
~~~
Imogen had been walking for about twenty minutes when she noticed that her arms were beginning to shake.
Her talisman was still glowing strong, not even flickering, but she could not shake the feeling in the air that something was desperately wrong. The Ork eyed her scrivening, looking for any tears in the luminescent design, but nothing seemed awry.
A few minutes later, however, Imogen was forced to stop as a wave of nausea passed through her. She leaned forward, hands on her knees as she fought with the feeling, breathing hard. She noticed again that her arms had begun twitching.
The witch looked at the talisman again. Still fine. She resolved to proceed- she wasn’t about to let mere nerves overcome her.
This time, though, she only got a few more meters before she was forced to her knees, where she noisily threw up.
Head spinning, panting, Imogen let out another deep breath… and disappeared.
~~~
The Ork spent about four hours resting in the bole of a tree, just shy of the treeline marking the entry to the wastelands. Her talisman had lost its charge by that point, but she’d watched it to the bitter end; not a flicker. Whatever was killing the plants here, it wasn’t any sort of void or chaotic magic.
She supposed that made sense. She’d sort of forgotten this in her contemplations, but she had been dispatched here by a metal spirit. Whatever was going on here surely concerned that element chiefly.
Well, fine. If it was a physical force which was preventing her approach, then that opened another option. It wasn’t one which Imogen was excited about, but she did pride herself on her lateral thinking.
Once she’d recovered to the point where her stomach no longer ached and she didn’t feel like she was in any physical danger of death, Imogen invoked the powers of the Cardinal Rune of Traversion and stood- stepping right out of her body resting below.
"Guard that." Said the witch, her voice echoing through the astral realm. She wasn’t totally sure if anything in the living realm could hear her, but she didn’t need it to- with a wash of shimmering silver light, her trusty zweihander materialized out of the air, leaning against the tree next to her. Unless she was phenomenally unfortunate today, it would be sufficient to ward off any of the jungle’s ordinary threats.
That formality satisfied, Imogen began making her way across the blasted lands once more. Unbound from space, her ghostly body moved at a rapid clip, flickering across the landscape. She might even have been briefly and eerily visible in spectral form if there were any mortal watchers in that cursed heath, which there weren’t.
It wasn’t long before Imogen detected a gradual downward slope in her floating gait, and stopped to take stock of the material world. Here, it seemed, there was a great caldera of sorts, a large and gently-sloping land leading down to a nadir. She knelt for a moment to inspect the rocks, though she could not touch them.
They didn’t look volcanic. What was going on?
As Imogen had expected, there was a mound of rock and dirt collecting at the crater’s center point; mostly dirt. If she’d been here in body it would have been too much to dig through, but dirt and rock alike posed no barrier to her spirit form.
Phasing through the dirt was an obnoxious proposition, largely because each descent buried her senses in dark softness, and no matter where she moved, nothing seemed to change. Were it not for the map of Slipspace always in her mind, she would have had no landmarks at all to search through. With some basic deductions and a grid search, however, Imoghost Ward soon found the hollow she’d been hoping for.
The cavern beneath the crater was not extensive, but it was… well… cavernous. Wide and twisty in turns, and illuminated above by light pouring through hidden holes she had not noticed on her trek down.
Thankfully, once within the cave, the problem was extraordinarily obvious.
► Show Spoiler
A huge, round, squat boulder lay in the middle of the cavern. At first, it seemed like it was lit from within, but careful observation revealed that the boulder was rather surrounded by a nimbus of glowing dust. That wasn’t all, though; long, black, shiny bars of unidentifiable metal protruded outward in a halo around the rock. Imogen believed them affixed in place, but soon noticed that they were actually drifting slowly about the boulder in an unclear pattern.
No doubt this rock was the cause of the wasting in this region. You didn’t just find an eerie, threatening magic boulder which looked like it had crashed down from the heavens, surrounded by a ten-mile radius of death, and conclude anything else.
It was this rock for sure. The only problem was…
"What the fuck is this."
