Glade 63, 122
Imogen stood at the edge of the blasted lands, mustering her courage.
She’d waited for some time to complete this, the final part of her plan to contain the deadly rock. There had been no choice in that; though she’d obtained a suitable totem some months prior, her only hope of surviving the upcoming task required time to gather power.
Once the witch considered that, she almost instinctively moved a hand to her stomach, feeling the smooth crystal protruding from her skin. It was a simple application of therianthropy, to relocate the organ and adjust its size for an Ork’s body; it had been a lot more difficult to manage while in bird form. She would need to give some thought, in the future, to finding a way to maintain a connection to this stone across forms.
But however justified her decision was, it was unfortunate. She knew that the longer she waited to enact her plan, the harder it would be, and the temptation to simply turn around and ignore the big stupid death rock was very strong right now.
There were plenty of reasons to leave. It wasn’t as though the metal spirits were going to pay her, and it wasn’t totally clear who would benefit from her actions this day. Everything which the rock was going to kill in this blasted plain had already died; sure, perhaps the strange effect would push through and kill a few more lines of trees over the course of years, but it wasn’t as though she was crusading against lumberjacks.
Only two reasons to go through with this presented themselves. First: she’d been asked by Kynne–that is, Vhexur–to humor the spirits, and he had promised payment of a sort. Second: the spirits had asked. Presumably, if the strange metal-hating death-rock were done harming this land, the spirits of it would not have asked her for her aid.
"I already put in the hard work." Imogen muttered to herself, trying to push through this unfamiliar malaise, "All that’s left is to pick it up and move it."
Ultimately, that’s all her plan came down to. Pick up the damn rock. Put it over there.
But it was going to hurt.
The witch walked through Slipspace once more, back towards the shallow cavern where she’d first located the strange stone. Knowing, now, where the thing lay in the material plane, the journey from the edge of the forest to the heart of the badlands did not take long. Were she a bit more practiced and confident in walking the secret paths behind the world, she was sure she could have moved between the two spots with a single step.
Yet Imogen was glad of the delay, because this time she walked in flesh. She’d spent weeks studying the sample she’d acquired from the stone, to determine how best to defend herself, to shield herself from it. The results of those experiments were bleak.
The stone’s strange influence dissolved metals, she’d discovered. In small exposure, this presented like a slow weakening, a corrosion. Close up, they softened until they melted like wax, forming strange and ill-smelling compounds on the floor of her beachside hut. It didn’t seem to penetrate other materials well, but it hardly mattered- close enough to touch, the rock would liquefy even a very thick metal shell in minutes.
Perhaps the natural question then was- who cared? Simply use some non-metal substance to shield and move the damn thing, right?
Counterintuitively, most things were actually more vulnerable than pure metal. Wood, rock, flesh of any sort- they all drew their essential strength from the element of metal, even if in small traces. Those traces fell to the rock’s dire influence swiftly, and so rocks crumbled, wood split, and living tissues simply died.
The only thing which really seemed to work without issue was water, of all things. It effectively shielded other substances and was not, itself, affected in any way Imogen could detect. So the answer was simple- put the damn thing in a big pool of water. She’d spent weeks preparing a place. Underwater, underground, offshore, deep and dark enough that it would never manage to liquefy its way out and unknown to any living creature but herself and a couple of seagulls.
She just had to get it there.
Imogen began her transformation while within Slipspace, intent on wasting as little time as possible once in the rock’s vicinity. Her shape of choice was a chimera, though not in the traditional sense of incorporating many discrete bestial features. It was a hybrid of two animals; the coppershell beetles of Southern Ecith and the Greater Northern Hydra of Karnor.
She emerged from slipspace in the form of an enormous beetle, covered not in chitinous armor, but in gleaming plates of thick metal. Its insectoid muscles were bolstered with coils of serpentine flesh, coated in their own thinner metallic scales. This chimeric form was ten meters long, and crowned with the artificial Gallstone she’d spent the better part of three months incubating within her own flesh.
This form was strong, resilient, and could have survived this blighted waste indefinitely, so long as she kept some distance from the killing rock. Unfortunately, she wasn’t going to do that. No, she was going to pick up the fucking thing and take a walk with it.
Picking up the rock wasn’t especially easy; she couldn’t surround it with snake coils or arms, as any limb would have been relatively unshielded by the thick metal shell. No, she had to put the thing on her own back. Thankfully, the Greater Beetlegen was prepared to do just that, hooking her horned beetle-head beneath the rock and hefting it up, adjusting her wing-covers to cradle the rock as best she could without leaving too many windows to vulnerable flesh beneath.
The rock was much lighter than its size would suggest, but still undoubtedly the heaviest thing Imogen had ever lifted. Thankfully, the Hydreetle was well-suited to the task, and it took only a few moments for her to find a position where the poisonous stone balanced on her back.
It wasn’t too bad, yet. The Hydreetle’s metal shell was thick; it would take some time before the stone’s poison bored through and the drain on the Gallstone would start. For the moment, it was just heavy, and that wasn’t enough to bother Imogen Ward in any form.
Better to start while it was easy, then. She’d have taken a deep breath, if the form permitted, but it did not- so she opened a short portal to the surface of the blighted wastes and stepped through, exposing the vile stone to the air above once more.
Chimeragen trundled across the wastes. That was probably the right word for her locomotion today- a beetle moved quickly through scuttling, a hydra slithered slowly, but her carefully-constructed chimeric form was on legs and those legs did not move very quickly under the weight of its own shell and the enormous rock atop it.
It was almost a calming journey, if she weren’t so nervous. Even though she moved at a trundle, the Hydreetle was large enough that it made reasonable time, moving in a straight line towards the coastline. Imogen’s mind was prone to drifting, and it happened a few times during this first leg of her travail.
By the time she’d reached the treeline, though, she could feel energy beginning to flow from the stone embedded in her head. The poison rock’s power had begun to corrode a hollow in her shell, and heavily-aspected aether flowed rapidly down her carapace to fix it.
The trees themselves posed a problem- her chimeric form was a little too large to dart between some of them. This would have been no issue in the northern jungles, where the trees tended to challenge the skies like towers and had plenty of space between them, but these were not quite so enormous. Still, she didn’t try a more circuitous route. Whenever the trees blocked passage, she simply Blinked through, unwilling to delay.
If she ran out of power in the Gallstone before she reached her little island, then it would mean she’d done nothing more than move the poison west, to where it could kill even more.
A few hours later, the trundling Hydreetle made her way to the rockier interior of the land, which put her about halfway to the water, and perhaps a third of the way to her destination. She had measured the journey before she undertook it, of course, but she could only estimate how much power it would require from the Gallstone.
She was starting to worry she’d underestimated that.
The Gallstone was not really meant to be on the outside of a creature–Hydra kept them deep in their gullets–so it glowed with a wan light reflecting the aether stored within. Imogen’s beetle eyes weren’t exceptionally sharp, but it did seem to her that it had begun to dim, flickering just a little.
She let herself drift a bit north in order to get onto the rocky ground at the foothills, where the trees were sparser and it was easier to avoid Blinking. It took a lot of power to move a body this large, even if it wasn’t very far.
She pulled up past one hill, where volcanic activity had long ago polished the obsidian to a mirror-shine, and she almost stopped to take a look at herself carrying the rock… but she was on a tight schedule.
Imogen did catch a few glimpses, as she walked, of an image of herself; not the beetle chimera, but as an Ork. Her mirror image stood, frowning, eyes blank portals to flickering static beyond, and shook her head with disappointment.
If her beetle form could speak, Imogen might have tried to justify herself to the spirit, which she recognized very well. As it was, though, she had no time to address the being’s disapproval. She would simply have to explain herself to its master later.
By the time she reached the coast, the Gallstone was visibly flickering and sparking as it fueled the tireless regeneration of the Hydreetle’s shell. Worse, the stone was beginning to burn. Though she’s shaped the Hydreetle with fairly few pain receptors, she hadn’t dared give it none. Otherwise, it could inflict fatal damage to Imogen’s transformed vitals without her ever knowing, and the power of the Cardinal Rune of Animus could not heal her of that.
In some ways, this was a relief. If her magic failed on the way to the little island, then she had a backup plan- to simply dump the stone into the ocean and try later to retrieve it. In the water, she thought it would pose less harm, per her experiments.
On the other hand, what if it dropped into an ocean current and dissolved into poison, circling the seas? Who knew how much damage that would cause?
No, she would make it across and to the island. But to do it, she was going to need to make a small change to the Hydreetle. As she reached the sea and began to trundle in, her chimera’s legs began to dissolve, disintegrating away into silver. By the time she’d transitioned entirely to the deeper water, her head (and the rock) were held up by the movements of a long, serpentine tail.
By the time her Gallstone’s power ran out, the little island–she’d decided to call it Serendipity–was in sight.
She had to make a choice then and there. The safest thing, for her, would be to roll and dump the stone right away, before it could finally burn through her metal carapace and begin enervating the flesh beneath. On the other hand, if she could just push forward…
It was never a real choice. If she could get close enough for one last Blink, she could get the stone into the containment cavern. If there was to be injury, well. That was a Sunsinger’s duty.
The burning slowly increased as she swam, as the stone began to burn through and its poison started to tickle the skin beneath. It started slow, anyway. By the time Imogen felt silt and island beneath her coils, waves of pain and weakness were beginning to pervade her entire body.
She forced her great bulk onto the shore of Serendipity, which was a hard thing for a Hydra even when it wasn’t carrying a poisonous rock or enormous metal beetle carapace. She did not expect Raella or Aedrin to offer her any particular praise for the Hydreetle design, frankly. It wasn’t likely to be a smash hit.
Sadly, the slither-trundle movement finally failed her here. As she pushed her bulk up onto the shore, the stone tipped over, rolling off her back. Thankfully, due to a quirk of the shoreline, it fell onto a bed of shale gravel and did not roll back into the ocean.
Less thankfully, it landed right next to Imogen.
Freed from the thick metal shell, the stone’s poison acted immediately. She fell to her side, thrashing, as pain blossomed along her side. Trying to rise was useless, as she was exhausted… but if she couldn’t move away quickly, the stone would surely kill her.
The Ork tried to pull herself together, but even her iron will couldn’t overcome a physical disability. The most she could do was maneuver around on her side to look at the stone. But that was enough.
With one final act of will, Imogen tore open Slipspace beneath the poisonous stone. It fell quietly in, then sank into the water at its destination in the cavern just beneath the center of the isle. A moment later, her aether gave out, and the portal closed.
Imogen lay there on the beach. She would have panted, or cried, but the Hydreetle could do neither. She would have to wait a while until she was strong enough to reclaim her Orkhan form to do those things.
Instead, pained but victorious, she simply fell asleep.
Imogen stood at the edge of the blasted lands, mustering her courage.
She’d waited for some time to complete this, the final part of her plan to contain the deadly rock. There had been no choice in that; though she’d obtained a suitable totem some months prior, her only hope of surviving the upcoming task required time to gather power.
Once the witch considered that, she almost instinctively moved a hand to her stomach, feeling the smooth crystal protruding from her skin. It was a simple application of therianthropy, to relocate the organ and adjust its size for an Ork’s body; it had been a lot more difficult to manage while in bird form. She would need to give some thought, in the future, to finding a way to maintain a connection to this stone across forms.
But however justified her decision was, it was unfortunate. She knew that the longer she waited to enact her plan, the harder it would be, and the temptation to simply turn around and ignore the big stupid death rock was very strong right now.
There were plenty of reasons to leave. It wasn’t as though the metal spirits were going to pay her, and it wasn’t totally clear who would benefit from her actions this day. Everything which the rock was going to kill in this blasted plain had already died; sure, perhaps the strange effect would push through and kill a few more lines of trees over the course of years, but it wasn’t as though she was crusading against lumberjacks.
Only two reasons to go through with this presented themselves. First: she’d been asked by Kynne–that is, Vhexur–to humor the spirits, and he had promised payment of a sort. Second: the spirits had asked. Presumably, if the strange metal-hating death-rock were done harming this land, the spirits of it would not have asked her for her aid.
"I already put in the hard work." Imogen muttered to herself, trying to push through this unfamiliar malaise, "All that’s left is to pick it up and move it."
Ultimately, that’s all her plan came down to. Pick up the damn rock. Put it over there.
But it was going to hurt.
~~~
The witch walked through Slipspace once more, back towards the shallow cavern where she’d first located the strange stone. Knowing, now, where the thing lay in the material plane, the journey from the edge of the forest to the heart of the badlands did not take long. Were she a bit more practiced and confident in walking the secret paths behind the world, she was sure she could have moved between the two spots with a single step.
Yet Imogen was glad of the delay, because this time she walked in flesh. She’d spent weeks studying the sample she’d acquired from the stone, to determine how best to defend herself, to shield herself from it. The results of those experiments were bleak.
The stone’s strange influence dissolved metals, she’d discovered. In small exposure, this presented like a slow weakening, a corrosion. Close up, they softened until they melted like wax, forming strange and ill-smelling compounds on the floor of her beachside hut. It didn’t seem to penetrate other materials well, but it hardly mattered- close enough to touch, the rock would liquefy even a very thick metal shell in minutes.
Perhaps the natural question then was- who cared? Simply use some non-metal substance to shield and move the damn thing, right?
Counterintuitively, most things were actually more vulnerable than pure metal. Wood, rock, flesh of any sort- they all drew their essential strength from the element of metal, even if in small traces. Those traces fell to the rock’s dire influence swiftly, and so rocks crumbled, wood split, and living tissues simply died.
The only thing which really seemed to work without issue was water, of all things. It effectively shielded other substances and was not, itself, affected in any way Imogen could detect. So the answer was simple- put the damn thing in a big pool of water. She’d spent weeks preparing a place. Underwater, underground, offshore, deep and dark enough that it would never manage to liquefy its way out and unknown to any living creature but herself and a couple of seagulls.
She just had to get it there.
~~~
Imogen began her transformation while within Slipspace, intent on wasting as little time as possible once in the rock’s vicinity. Her shape of choice was a chimera, though not in the traditional sense of incorporating many discrete bestial features. It was a hybrid of two animals; the coppershell beetles of Southern Ecith and the Greater Northern Hydra of Karnor.
She emerged from slipspace in the form of an enormous beetle, covered not in chitinous armor, but in gleaming plates of thick metal. Its insectoid muscles were bolstered with coils of serpentine flesh, coated in their own thinner metallic scales. This chimeric form was ten meters long, and crowned with the artificial Gallstone she’d spent the better part of three months incubating within her own flesh.
This form was strong, resilient, and could have survived this blighted waste indefinitely, so long as she kept some distance from the killing rock. Unfortunately, she wasn’t going to do that. No, she was going to pick up the fucking thing and take a walk with it.
Picking up the rock wasn’t especially easy; she couldn’t surround it with snake coils or arms, as any limb would have been relatively unshielded by the thick metal shell. No, she had to put the thing on her own back. Thankfully, the Greater Beetlegen was prepared to do just that, hooking her horned beetle-head beneath the rock and hefting it up, adjusting her wing-covers to cradle the rock as best she could without leaving too many windows to vulnerable flesh beneath.
The rock was much lighter than its size would suggest, but still undoubtedly the heaviest thing Imogen had ever lifted. Thankfully, the Hydreetle was well-suited to the task, and it took only a few moments for her to find a position where the poisonous stone balanced on her back.
It wasn’t too bad, yet. The Hydreetle’s metal shell was thick; it would take some time before the stone’s poison bored through and the drain on the Gallstone would start. For the moment, it was just heavy, and that wasn’t enough to bother Imogen Ward in any form.
Better to start while it was easy, then. She’d have taken a deep breath, if the form permitted, but it did not- so she opened a short portal to the surface of the blighted wastes and stepped through, exposing the vile stone to the air above once more.
~~~
Chimeragen trundled across the wastes. That was probably the right word for her locomotion today- a beetle moved quickly through scuttling, a hydra slithered slowly, but her carefully-constructed chimeric form was on legs and those legs did not move very quickly under the weight of its own shell and the enormous rock atop it.
It was almost a calming journey, if she weren’t so nervous. Even though she moved at a trundle, the Hydreetle was large enough that it made reasonable time, moving in a straight line towards the coastline. Imogen’s mind was prone to drifting, and it happened a few times during this first leg of her travail.
By the time she’d reached the treeline, though, she could feel energy beginning to flow from the stone embedded in her head. The poison rock’s power had begun to corrode a hollow in her shell, and heavily-aspected aether flowed rapidly down her carapace to fix it.
The trees themselves posed a problem- her chimeric form was a little too large to dart between some of them. This would have been no issue in the northern jungles, where the trees tended to challenge the skies like towers and had plenty of space between them, but these were not quite so enormous. Still, she didn’t try a more circuitous route. Whenever the trees blocked passage, she simply Blinked through, unwilling to delay.
If she ran out of power in the Gallstone before she reached her little island, then it would mean she’d done nothing more than move the poison west, to where it could kill even more.
~~~
A few hours later, the trundling Hydreetle made her way to the rockier interior of the land, which put her about halfway to the water, and perhaps a third of the way to her destination. She had measured the journey before she undertook it, of course, but she could only estimate how much power it would require from the Gallstone.
She was starting to worry she’d underestimated that.
The Gallstone was not really meant to be on the outside of a creature–Hydra kept them deep in their gullets–so it glowed with a wan light reflecting the aether stored within. Imogen’s beetle eyes weren’t exceptionally sharp, but it did seem to her that it had begun to dim, flickering just a little.
She let herself drift a bit north in order to get onto the rocky ground at the foothills, where the trees were sparser and it was easier to avoid Blinking. It took a lot of power to move a body this large, even if it wasn’t very far.
She pulled up past one hill, where volcanic activity had long ago polished the obsidian to a mirror-shine, and she almost stopped to take a look at herself carrying the rock… but she was on a tight schedule.
Imogen did catch a few glimpses, as she walked, of an image of herself; not the beetle chimera, but as an Ork. Her mirror image stood, frowning, eyes blank portals to flickering static beyond, and shook her head with disappointment.
If her beetle form could speak, Imogen might have tried to justify herself to the spirit, which she recognized very well. As it was, though, she had no time to address the being’s disapproval. She would simply have to explain herself to its master later.
~~~
By the time she reached the coast, the Gallstone was visibly flickering and sparking as it fueled the tireless regeneration of the Hydreetle’s shell. Worse, the stone was beginning to burn. Though she’s shaped the Hydreetle with fairly few pain receptors, she hadn’t dared give it none. Otherwise, it could inflict fatal damage to Imogen’s transformed vitals without her ever knowing, and the power of the Cardinal Rune of Animus could not heal her of that.
In some ways, this was a relief. If her magic failed on the way to the little island, then she had a backup plan- to simply dump the stone into the ocean and try later to retrieve it. In the water, she thought it would pose less harm, per her experiments.
On the other hand, what if it dropped into an ocean current and dissolved into poison, circling the seas? Who knew how much damage that would cause?
No, she would make it across and to the island. But to do it, she was going to need to make a small change to the Hydreetle. As she reached the sea and began to trundle in, her chimera’s legs began to dissolve, disintegrating away into silver. By the time she’d transitioned entirely to the deeper water, her head (and the rock) were held up by the movements of a long, serpentine tail.
~~~
By the time her Gallstone’s power ran out, the little island–she’d decided to call it Serendipity–was in sight.
She had to make a choice then and there. The safest thing, for her, would be to roll and dump the stone right away, before it could finally burn through her metal carapace and begin enervating the flesh beneath. On the other hand, if she could just push forward…
It was never a real choice. If she could get close enough for one last Blink, she could get the stone into the containment cavern. If there was to be injury, well. That was a Sunsinger’s duty.
The burning slowly increased as she swam, as the stone began to burn through and its poison started to tickle the skin beneath. It started slow, anyway. By the time Imogen felt silt and island beneath her coils, waves of pain and weakness were beginning to pervade her entire body.
She forced her great bulk onto the shore of Serendipity, which was a hard thing for a Hydra even when it wasn’t carrying a poisonous rock or enormous metal beetle carapace. She did not expect Raella or Aedrin to offer her any particular praise for the Hydreetle design, frankly. It wasn’t likely to be a smash hit.
Sadly, the slither-trundle movement finally failed her here. As she pushed her bulk up onto the shore, the stone tipped over, rolling off her back. Thankfully, due to a quirk of the shoreline, it fell onto a bed of shale gravel and did not roll back into the ocean.
Less thankfully, it landed right next to Imogen.
Freed from the thick metal shell, the stone’s poison acted immediately. She fell to her side, thrashing, as pain blossomed along her side. Trying to rise was useless, as she was exhausted… but if she couldn’t move away quickly, the stone would surely kill her.
The Ork tried to pull herself together, but even her iron will couldn’t overcome a physical disability. The most she could do was maneuver around on her side to look at the stone. But that was enough.
With one final act of will, Imogen tore open Slipspace beneath the poisonous stone. It fell quietly in, then sank into the water at its destination in the cavern just beneath the center of the isle. A moment later, her aether gave out, and the portal closed.
Imogen lay there on the beach. She would have panted, or cried, but the Hydreetle could do neither. She would have to wait a while until she was strong enough to reclaim her Orkhan form to do those things.
Instead, pained but victorious, she simply fell asleep.
