Riddle of Steel [Pt III]
Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2023 11:34 pm
Glade 74, 122
"It took me a while to figure it out." the witch admitted, "At first, I thought the elf was dead, which was close. Then I thought she was alive, which wasn’t. Wasn’t even right enough to be wrong."
Birchen–the thing which had been called Birchen–did not respond to the allegation immediately. That was to be expected. Even if Imogen was wrong, which she was sure she wasn’t, the elf had not been even a little expressive as a companion.
After long moments, she replied:
“Why do you ask this now?”
"You said it yourself, we’ve got some time while this sword reforges itself."
“I see.”
To Imogen’s surprise, Birchen inhaled deeply, then let out a sigh. It wasn’t a very natural-looking process; clearly, she had to give some thought to how it all worked together.
“It is true, Birchen is not alive. Not now. She died long ago.”
Imogen nodded. Birchen was made of flesh, but she was neither alive nor any kind of necromantic construct- she’d learned enough from those dreadful days working with the Grymalka to tell that much. "And the sword?"
“He- is real. Really Birchen’s sword. When she died, he did not choose to accept it.”
As in a haze, Imogen could see it.
The spirit-sword had not taken Birchen’s death well. He loved her deeply, if not in the way that people understood love. It was, perhaps, an unacknowledged sorrow common to Spiritwalking; though many spirits of nature understood death and did not mourn it, still others could not. Birchen’s sword was a Palarae, high among the courts of metal whose comings and goings were not well-understood by mortal races, and the spirits of metal are not accustomed to loss.
Perhaps Birchen thought her sword would simply get over her death. But for a being with little knowledge of death, it made more sense to try to fix what was broken.
The ancient elf had died centuries past–it was hard to make out the image of what had killed her, something hulking and inhuman, which whirred and clicked as it stomped away–but her body had not remained there long. As Imogen watched with fascination and creeping dread, the spirit-sword began to inscribe a symbol upon the corpse.
It was no Rune with which she was familiar, but she recognized it all the same. It was the Cardinal Rune of Reaving, inverted.
"That-" said Imogen of the present, inside a small silver-lit cave, talking to a doll, "That is not how that works."
Birchen shrugged, as if to say that she obviously knew that.
It also meant that the thing Imogen was talking to, the facsimile of Birchen, was nothing more than a piece of the spirit, one it had split off and shaped into flesh. Imogen had no explanation for how; simply writing the Rune wrong on a corpse should not have succeeded even to this extent. Perhaps it was some power of the Palarae, which had been corrupted by its novel grief?
So that was it, then. A corrupted Palarae, which had somehow given itself the power to manifest a fleshy doppelganger of its late wielder. But there was still something missing…
"But this was centuries ago. How have you come to be here and now?"
Birchen (Imogen supposed that the spirit had shaped its own fragmentation enough that she could call this shard of it ‘Birchen’) looked back at the sword slowly absorbing the veins in the walls.
“He knew it had not worked. I spoke when he wished and said what he wanted, but it was not a true restoration. So he resolved to come to these lands and meet with the God of Truth, to make it true.”
Imogen’s eye twitched at this line of inane logic. It was the kind of solution a child might devise. You could not simply fix a lie by making it true; or if you could, truth simply meant nothing.
Birchen looked back at Imogen, and nodded. “This is what the other spirits thought. They did not take him to god. Instead, they imprisoned him very deep in the earth, between worlds. But he has found freedom after all this time, and will be whole again.”
The witch pursed her lips. It wasn’t the kind of story she’d been hoping to hear, to be sure, but it made a kind of sense. Perhaps the spirit had escaped due to the Eclipse. Maybe the metal spirits spending their power to imprison him simply felt that now they could let him free and allow her to deal with it. An aggravating thought, but there was truly nothing she could do about that.
“You are not upset?” Birchen seemed curious. “You do not think his plan will succeed, but you are not attacking.”
"Don’t really need to do anything." Imogen admitted. "The fire doesn’t… make things more true? It just burns away things which aren’t, is all."
Birchen blinked, slowly, almost a lizard-like reaction, then looked down, noticing for the first time that wisps of smoke were rising up off her skin.
Tiny flickers of silver light danced across Birchen’s skin as the Novaflame engulfing the corrupt Palarae finally overcame the false-Rune spell it had enacted, the flames taking to the aether as to tinder. It was not quick–the strange magic was, somehow, based in Metal, and was stubborn as the element always was–but the construct displayed no sign of pain. Yet another failure to grasp the true principles of Reaving, the witch thought.
“Will he get better?” Birchen asked, “When I’m gone?”
It would have been too great an irony, in that moment, to tell a comforting lie. ”Dunno. Maybe not." For all she knew, the spirit would burn away to nothing, leaving only a metal shell. You could seldom predict how much the silver fire would destroy; truth and justice sounded like an unalloyed good, but were as destructive as any other kind of flame when thoughtlessly loosed.
Most of the time, people did not get better when you set them on fire.
Birchen nodded, evidently feeling no anticipation of the coming oblivion. Probably she couldn’t. Imogen could fear that her Pact weapons would fail and shatter, but the weapons themselves could not.
“Well.” the simulacrum said, “Good-bye.”
With that, argent flame surrounded Birchen, and she slid lifelessly to the ground. The elf burned quickly, too. Novaflame spread across the Palarae’s corrupt enchantment like it was treated timber; the complex web of magic which had animated Birchen disintegrating in the fire before the witch could blink once.
This, it seemed, finally aroused the sword spirit, for the weapon howled with pain and rage, a metallic screech which felt to Imogen as though she were hearing it in her skull rather than with her ear. As she watched, the air around the floating sword began to boil, as the spirit awoke from its dream of being Birchen into the nightmare of her long loss.
To her surprise, slender arms began emerging from the distortion in the air. It took the ork a moment to process the sight, and yet more long seconds before she truly caught on to what was happening.
”Hey- hey hey whoa, whoa, no, don’t do that!"
Flesh boiled out of nothing as the enraged spirit began to call forth more simulacrums of Birchen. Nude, malformed, pressed against each other, the tide of grasping arms and lifeless eyes and screaming mouths pushed through the cave towards Imogen.
Thankfully, she was no helpless extra in a tragic play. Imogen stepped backwards and into Slipspace, emerging ten meters up and on the surface. With a flourish of her hand and will, she recalled her Pact sword from the kiln of nightmares below, conjuring it back to her side and into the relative quiet of the forest above.
The Ork warrior did not let her guard down. Now that the spirit was awake to itself once more, she had no idea what kind of capabilities it had. Could it become intangible and fly through the rock and dirt? Perhaps it could even pass through the veil as she had passed through slipspace, following her up-
Imogen’s morass of happy speculation was drained as the ground shattered beneath her. Cracks erupted in the earth as writhing masses of arms and bodies squeezed out of the ground, pushed upward by sheer volume. The Sunsinger hopped back a step, then another, finally backpedaling off the hill entirely as more of the twisted simulacrums began to emerge.
The mound of materialized flesh began to rise until it challenged the canopy, a great pillar of perfect mockeries of a woman whom nobody in Ransera had thought about for centuries. From an aesthetic perspective, it was alarming. From a technical viewpoint, even more so, for the aether it must have taken to manifest so many bodies was gobsmacking. It confronted Imogen with the uncomfortable fact that if the spirit were doing something more intentional than simply raging, it could have overwhelmed her own reserves of power with ease.
She didn’t have long to think. From the pile of bodies, more energized and animated simulcrula emerged- and they were all of them fixated on Imogen. The sight of so many nude elves charging might have been erotic in another context. In this one, it just made the ork feel nauseous.
As the first copies reached Imogen, she dispatched them quickly with diagonal swings of her sword. The cuts revealed no blood or gore beneath; as soon as her blade cleft each Birchen, they dissipated into clouds of mist.
Imogen’s eyes narrowed. That was a certain sign of corruption. She wondered if the Dread Mists had somehow built up within the spirit over the length of its madness and imprisonment, or if it had been burgeoning with them when it came to these shores in search of Raxen years ago.
It didn’t matter. At Imogen’s quiet call, her Pact spear materialized above her head and set about striking each emission of varicolored mist, the silver fire borrowed from Novuril after the fall of Ailos flaring to consume every cloud.
The witch did not know how long she stood there, cutting down Birchen after Birchen and burning away the sword’s corruption. Her arms did not tire, her stance never faltered. Sunsingers were trained to stand and fight for days, if needed, and no matter how vast this corrupt Palarae’s well of power, it was never going to grind her down.
Perhaps it sensed just that. In the midst of her slaughter, the ork realized that one of the Birchens charging her was armed, grasping the spirit-sword in her hands. The imposter’s approach was perfect, of course, honed by time and trial, and Imogen recalled with some trepidation the fallen tree where she’d first located the spirit and its simulacrum. Cleft in twain with a single cut.
The master Sunsinger turned to face the ancient spirit-sword in a duel the likes of which the world had seldom seen.
…is what would have happened, except that Imogen was not a great fan of accepting fights she wasn’t sure she could win. She was good at the sword, and a potent mage, but that spirit had been a sword for a hundred times longer than she had been alive and was throwing around enough aether to turn this corner of jungle into a hellscape.
No. When Birchen approached Imogen, her sword low, beginning a lunge which would drive the steel home into the Ork’s side… Imogen summoned a dozen blades to run her through from behind.
The projectiles took the simulacrum in the legs, arms and torso, pinning her instantly to the ground and sending the sword spinning across the earth towards the Ork. As it approached, she saw it begin to move by itself, the spirit within preparing to right its shell and continue their battle- so she stepped on the flat of the blade, trapping it beneath her foot.
Without another word, Imogen slammed her own Pact weapon into the spirit, driving the spirit sword a few inches into the earth. Remembering the mantra which had seen her through her fight with the ghostly spirit of Gihah, the Sunsinger pushed all of her aether into the weapon’s aura, sending concentrated gouts of nova-fire through the spirit once more.
As she had expected, the mound of Birchen beyond them burst into flames as well, but this time Imogen did not permit the wounded spirit to escape. She kept the thing pinned until power began to blaze outward from the spirit sword like a dying star, great gouts of flaming Dread Mists flowing outward from beneath her before they burned away to nothing.
Imogen kept up the magic even as she felt the sword weaken beneath her foot. When at last it stopped and she looked up, she found that the entire mound of Birchen simulacrum had not faded to nothing, as she’d expected- instead, the pillar of elf-flesh had petrified into gleaming metal.
The Ork lifted her foot off the spirit sword, but it did not move. Cautiously, she reached down and tapped the blade; no response. Only she remained in this clearing. Just her, a dead sword, and hundreds of metal statues of Birchen.
After a moment, Imogen spoke, addressing nobody.
”Sorry about that. I wish I could have done something more satisfying for him. But that’s the only answer swords ever really give."
"It took me a while to figure it out." the witch admitted, "At first, I thought the elf was dead, which was close. Then I thought she was alive, which wasn’t. Wasn’t even right enough to be wrong."
Birchen–the thing which had been called Birchen–did not respond to the allegation immediately. That was to be expected. Even if Imogen was wrong, which she was sure she wasn’t, the elf had not been even a little expressive as a companion.
After long moments, she replied:
“Why do you ask this now?”
"You said it yourself, we’ve got some time while this sword reforges itself."
“I see.”
To Imogen’s surprise, Birchen inhaled deeply, then let out a sigh. It wasn’t a very natural-looking process; clearly, she had to give some thought to how it all worked together.
“It is true, Birchen is not alive. Not now. She died long ago.”
Imogen nodded. Birchen was made of flesh, but she was neither alive nor any kind of necromantic construct- she’d learned enough from those dreadful days working with the Grymalka to tell that much. "And the sword?"
“He- is real. Really Birchen’s sword. When she died, he did not choose to accept it.”
~~~
As in a haze, Imogen could see it.
The spirit-sword had not taken Birchen’s death well. He loved her deeply, if not in the way that people understood love. It was, perhaps, an unacknowledged sorrow common to Spiritwalking; though many spirits of nature understood death and did not mourn it, still others could not. Birchen’s sword was a Palarae, high among the courts of metal whose comings and goings were not well-understood by mortal races, and the spirits of metal are not accustomed to loss.
Perhaps Birchen thought her sword would simply get over her death. But for a being with little knowledge of death, it made more sense to try to fix what was broken.
The ancient elf had died centuries past–it was hard to make out the image of what had killed her, something hulking and inhuman, which whirred and clicked as it stomped away–but her body had not remained there long. As Imogen watched with fascination and creeping dread, the spirit-sword began to inscribe a symbol upon the corpse.
It was no Rune with which she was familiar, but she recognized it all the same. It was the Cardinal Rune of Reaving, inverted.
~~~
"That-" said Imogen of the present, inside a small silver-lit cave, talking to a doll, "That is not how that works."
Birchen shrugged, as if to say that she obviously knew that.
It also meant that the thing Imogen was talking to, the facsimile of Birchen, was nothing more than a piece of the spirit, one it had split off and shaped into flesh. Imogen had no explanation for how; simply writing the Rune wrong on a corpse should not have succeeded even to this extent. Perhaps it was some power of the Palarae, which had been corrupted by its novel grief?
So that was it, then. A corrupted Palarae, which had somehow given itself the power to manifest a fleshy doppelganger of its late wielder. But there was still something missing…
"But this was centuries ago. How have you come to be here and now?"
Birchen (Imogen supposed that the spirit had shaped its own fragmentation enough that she could call this shard of it ‘Birchen’) looked back at the sword slowly absorbing the veins in the walls.
“He knew it had not worked. I spoke when he wished and said what he wanted, but it was not a true restoration. So he resolved to come to these lands and meet with the God of Truth, to make it true.”
Imogen’s eye twitched at this line of inane logic. It was the kind of solution a child might devise. You could not simply fix a lie by making it true; or if you could, truth simply meant nothing.
Birchen looked back at Imogen, and nodded. “This is what the other spirits thought. They did not take him to god. Instead, they imprisoned him very deep in the earth, between worlds. But he has found freedom after all this time, and will be whole again.”
The witch pursed her lips. It wasn’t the kind of story she’d been hoping to hear, to be sure, but it made a kind of sense. Perhaps the spirit had escaped due to the Eclipse. Maybe the metal spirits spending their power to imprison him simply felt that now they could let him free and allow her to deal with it. An aggravating thought, but there was truly nothing she could do about that.
“You are not upset?” Birchen seemed curious. “You do not think his plan will succeed, but you are not attacking.”
"Don’t really need to do anything." Imogen admitted. "The fire doesn’t… make things more true? It just burns away things which aren’t, is all."
Birchen blinked, slowly, almost a lizard-like reaction, then looked down, noticing for the first time that wisps of smoke were rising up off her skin.
Tiny flickers of silver light danced across Birchen’s skin as the Novaflame engulfing the corrupt Palarae finally overcame the false-Rune spell it had enacted, the flames taking to the aether as to tinder. It was not quick–the strange magic was, somehow, based in Metal, and was stubborn as the element always was–but the construct displayed no sign of pain. Yet another failure to grasp the true principles of Reaving, the witch thought.
“Will he get better?” Birchen asked, “When I’m gone?”
It would have been too great an irony, in that moment, to tell a comforting lie. ”Dunno. Maybe not." For all she knew, the spirit would burn away to nothing, leaving only a metal shell. You could seldom predict how much the silver fire would destroy; truth and justice sounded like an unalloyed good, but were as destructive as any other kind of flame when thoughtlessly loosed.
Most of the time, people did not get better when you set them on fire.
Birchen nodded, evidently feeling no anticipation of the coming oblivion. Probably she couldn’t. Imogen could fear that her Pact weapons would fail and shatter, but the weapons themselves could not.
“Well.” the simulacrum said, “Good-bye.”
With that, argent flame surrounded Birchen, and she slid lifelessly to the ground. The elf burned quickly, too. Novaflame spread across the Palarae’s corrupt enchantment like it was treated timber; the complex web of magic which had animated Birchen disintegrating in the fire before the witch could blink once.
This, it seemed, finally aroused the sword spirit, for the weapon howled with pain and rage, a metallic screech which felt to Imogen as though she were hearing it in her skull rather than with her ear. As she watched, the air around the floating sword began to boil, as the spirit awoke from its dream of being Birchen into the nightmare of her long loss.
To her surprise, slender arms began emerging from the distortion in the air. It took the ork a moment to process the sight, and yet more long seconds before she truly caught on to what was happening.
”Hey- hey hey whoa, whoa, no, don’t do that!"
Flesh boiled out of nothing as the enraged spirit began to call forth more simulacrums of Birchen. Nude, malformed, pressed against each other, the tide of grasping arms and lifeless eyes and screaming mouths pushed through the cave towards Imogen.
Thankfully, she was no helpless extra in a tragic play. Imogen stepped backwards and into Slipspace, emerging ten meters up and on the surface. With a flourish of her hand and will, she recalled her Pact sword from the kiln of nightmares below, conjuring it back to her side and into the relative quiet of the forest above.
The Ork warrior did not let her guard down. Now that the spirit was awake to itself once more, she had no idea what kind of capabilities it had. Could it become intangible and fly through the rock and dirt? Perhaps it could even pass through the veil as she had passed through slipspace, following her up-
Imogen’s morass of happy speculation was drained as the ground shattered beneath her. Cracks erupted in the earth as writhing masses of arms and bodies squeezed out of the ground, pushed upward by sheer volume. The Sunsinger hopped back a step, then another, finally backpedaling off the hill entirely as more of the twisted simulacrums began to emerge.
The mound of materialized flesh began to rise until it challenged the canopy, a great pillar of perfect mockeries of a woman whom nobody in Ransera had thought about for centuries. From an aesthetic perspective, it was alarming. From a technical viewpoint, even more so, for the aether it must have taken to manifest so many bodies was gobsmacking. It confronted Imogen with the uncomfortable fact that if the spirit were doing something more intentional than simply raging, it could have overwhelmed her own reserves of power with ease.
She didn’t have long to think. From the pile of bodies, more energized and animated simulcrula emerged- and they were all of them fixated on Imogen. The sight of so many nude elves charging might have been erotic in another context. In this one, it just made the ork feel nauseous.
As the first copies reached Imogen, she dispatched them quickly with diagonal swings of her sword. The cuts revealed no blood or gore beneath; as soon as her blade cleft each Birchen, they dissipated into clouds of mist.
Imogen’s eyes narrowed. That was a certain sign of corruption. She wondered if the Dread Mists had somehow built up within the spirit over the length of its madness and imprisonment, or if it had been burgeoning with them when it came to these shores in search of Raxen years ago.
It didn’t matter. At Imogen’s quiet call, her Pact spear materialized above her head and set about striking each emission of varicolored mist, the silver fire borrowed from Novuril after the fall of Ailos flaring to consume every cloud.
The witch did not know how long she stood there, cutting down Birchen after Birchen and burning away the sword’s corruption. Her arms did not tire, her stance never faltered. Sunsingers were trained to stand and fight for days, if needed, and no matter how vast this corrupt Palarae’s well of power, it was never going to grind her down.
Perhaps it sensed just that. In the midst of her slaughter, the ork realized that one of the Birchens charging her was armed, grasping the spirit-sword in her hands. The imposter’s approach was perfect, of course, honed by time and trial, and Imogen recalled with some trepidation the fallen tree where she’d first located the spirit and its simulacrum. Cleft in twain with a single cut.
The master Sunsinger turned to face the ancient spirit-sword in a duel the likes of which the world had seldom seen.
~~~
…is what would have happened, except that Imogen was not a great fan of accepting fights she wasn’t sure she could win. She was good at the sword, and a potent mage, but that spirit had been a sword for a hundred times longer than she had been alive and was throwing around enough aether to turn this corner of jungle into a hellscape.
No. When Birchen approached Imogen, her sword low, beginning a lunge which would drive the steel home into the Ork’s side… Imogen summoned a dozen blades to run her through from behind.
The projectiles took the simulacrum in the legs, arms and torso, pinning her instantly to the ground and sending the sword spinning across the earth towards the Ork. As it approached, she saw it begin to move by itself, the spirit within preparing to right its shell and continue their battle- so she stepped on the flat of the blade, trapping it beneath her foot.
Without another word, Imogen slammed her own Pact weapon into the spirit, driving the spirit sword a few inches into the earth. Remembering the mantra which had seen her through her fight with the ghostly spirit of Gihah, the Sunsinger pushed all of her aether into the weapon’s aura, sending concentrated gouts of nova-fire through the spirit once more.
As she had expected, the mound of Birchen beyond them burst into flames as well, but this time Imogen did not permit the wounded spirit to escape. She kept the thing pinned until power began to blaze outward from the spirit sword like a dying star, great gouts of flaming Dread Mists flowing outward from beneath her before they burned away to nothing.
Imogen kept up the magic even as she felt the sword weaken beneath her foot. When at last it stopped and she looked up, she found that the entire mound of Birchen simulacrum had not faded to nothing, as she’d expected- instead, the pillar of elf-flesh had petrified into gleaming metal.
The Ork lifted her foot off the spirit sword, but it did not move. Cautiously, she reached down and tapped the blade; no response. Only she remained in this clearing. Just her, a dead sword, and hundreds of metal statues of Birchen.
After a moment, Imogen spoke, addressing nobody.
”Sorry about that. I wish I could have done something more satisfying for him. But that’s the only answer swords ever really give."