Dreams In Iron [Pt 3]
Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2024 10:24 pm
Frost 15, 123
When the witch awoke the next morning, she felt like shit.
Her arms seemed heavy as she pushed herself upright, still not totally used to the concave bed, and her head throbbed with the tell-tale pangs of dehydration. When she managed to force herself upright, her spine was stiff and her skin seemed oddly sensitive.
Kitty–who was characteristically useless as an alarm clock due to his nocturnal preferences–jolted awake next to her and began to nudge, clearly signaling a desire for breakfast. The witch forced herself to her feet, wobbling a bit.
"Fuck me." she muttered, wincing as her raspy voice hurt her own ears. "Did I come down sick with sommat?"
There was no answer from Kitty, who was not a trained physician in any event. She set about trying to clean herself up enough to be presentable outside, stopping only to check on the sword she’d left leaning there. Memories of the ritual from yesterday bubbled up in her mind.
"I guess feeling like shit is one of the aspects of life, sometimes." she sighed, "Well, I doubt it’s serious. Come o-urgh!"
Imogen lifted a hand and summoned her sword to it, then grunted in surprise. Even that act of magic was weirdly… heavy. There was an unexpected exertion to this, the most basic act of Reaving, the like of which she hadn’t experienced since shortly after initiation.
The witch lifted her shirt to look at the Cardinal Runes emblazoned upon her chest. The clear lines of the Rune of Reaving looked the same as ever. But on the other breast, where the totems of Animus were engraved…
The witch blinked. "Is that even possible?"
“Well, there was a time I would have said no.” the healer admitted, “But I think we’ve got to consider the possibility.”
"You think my aether is simply… draining away?" Imogen asked, baffled "It’s got to go somewhere, hasn’t it? Am I leaking?"
“Not to my eyes, but I’m not the Sembler I was in my youth. I wonder if it might relate to that, though…?”
The woman tapped the marking on Imogen’s breast which should have signified a totem, but instead was simply a broken mess of symbols.
“Have you tried invoking it?”
"A little. Nothing happens, though. Clearly the totem did not… uh, work."
Neither Imogen nor the healer knew what that meant, though. The Cardinal Runes were some of the most complex types of magic, and the ones bestowed upon the mortal races by the dragon gods themselves tended to be pretty, well… user-friendly? If a mage couldn’t encompass a totem, it should simply have failed to work, perhaps leading to some level of overstepping. It shouldn’t break the Rune.
“Hmm.” the healer said, plainly unsure what other advice to give, “Maybe this is just overstepping. Or some ailment you picked up out there. I would suggest trying bed rest like any other illness- and if that doesn’t work, you’ll have to go to Drathera and get one of the Green Dragonflight to examine that.”
"Sadly, I can’t spend too much time asleep for the next few days." the ritual wouldn’t do shit if all it transmitted was the inside of her bedroom, "Any risks, do you think?"
The healer frowned, cocking her head as she assessed Imogen’s aura. “You have plenty of power, much more aether than most of the people I’ve treated. Even if the drain gets worse, it ought to be a while before it begins to harm your health seriously. Just don’t do anything fancy. Use as little magic as possible for a while.”
"Of course," the witch said, nodding, "that shouldn’t be too difficult."
For the next four days, Imogen focused her attention on living life.
She’d expected that to be a little difficult, confined to the little community living on the Isle of Dawn, but it wasn’t. Sure, they didn’t have a theater where she could watch any great works of art, but there were plenty of people willing to tell stories in the evening. There were no eateries, but plenty of orks willing to share recipes and tables.
Most of the first day was dedicated to playing with children. That might seem like something of a waste of time, but it’s a valuable service in every community, and having someone older than the older children around to tell them new stories was a valuable commodity. A few days of entertaining a child was worth a meal at their family’s hearth, so you didn’t even need to keep a very large group occupied for it to be worthwhile.
The second day was for a different sort of play. In many communities, the older kids would have joined the Shield Legions and been trained to fight–something of a valuable experience in exchange for their service–and many here had, but on Ailos they couldn’t simply send all the older children away. It was too far out from Drathera, and there were still things on the island which required a certain amount of ready force.
While Imogen wasn’t looking for an apprentice at this time, she remained a master swordswoman, and quite skilled with an entire array of weapons. She had her trainees come out and drill in a block, walking along the edges to observe their form. She had no weapons to give them, but most families in Ecith kept some to hand, be they bows, bludgeons, swords or other, stranger implements for which she had no name.
Of course, you could only do so much in a single afternoon, but she didn’t really know how long she’d be staying on the island, and if she could leave it just a little better-defended than she’d found it…?
One of the things she’d wondered, of course, was if any of the Dawnmartyrs remained. People were cagey about the subject, and with good cause; it had been well-known for the last twenty years that the open presence of the Order could draw hunters from the Imperium. But some of the youth here showed signs of real training, and she suspected that perhaps those with more promise had been taken elsewhere entirely.
She didn’t press. Nobody was paying her to investigate the secrets of the old Dawnmartyrs, after all.
The third day, Imogen decided to devote to a little exploration and sightseeing. The ruins of the Citadel were extensive, and her magic gave her a unique opportunity to glimpse it at the height of its grandeur.
The Ork spent hours between dawn and dusk simply wandering the ruins, occasionally pressing the tip of her sword to a rock and glimpsing the things it had seen before being reduced to rubble. Unlike her sudden and extensive flashbacks with the dragon or the fallen wonder of the Boundless Empire, these came only as flashes, devoid of context:
Here, two Dawnmartyr orkhan spent some time chatting as the sun fell, one leaning against a brilliant marble terrace. The other stepped in tentatively, to lay a hand on the small of his back.
There, a group of young knights watched as a man with a supple silver mustache demonstrated one of the principles of Reaving, imbuing an arrow with twisting purple Aether before nocking his bow and firing an ethereal snake heavensward-
In this corner, a stage remembered, that Arcas had stood upon it, though not in the form which Imogen remembered. It was somewhat baffling to see such a familiar figure appear in so different a body.
And here, a bench, miraculously untouched, recalled one knight sitting upon it, a breathtakingly beautiful Orkhan woman wearing only a sheer fabric shift and dazzling rainbow scales-
The witch blinked, belatedly recognizing her own grandmother. Not looking as she’d ever known her, but a perfect fit for the little illustration her father had kept with him on his postings. "Wait," she pleaded with nothing, “Her, show me her again-"
But she knew that wasn’t how the magic worked, and she was correct. No amount of poking (literally) around in the past of that small boulevard turned up another memory of the woman. Unfortunate, but to be expected; it was unbelievable luck that she found even one glimpse. She wondered if it would be kept somewhere within the Lorestone mounted on the sword, to be dug up later, or if it was gone forever.
The itinerant Sunsinger spent some more time wandering around and watching flickering ghosts, but nothing particularly stuck out to her. Fear, anger, promises, love, loss, hope… the spectrum of mortal emotion played out in flickers, but other than the aesthetics it was nothing you couldn’t see in any village.
Maybe that was the lesson for her. These heroes of old had just been people, after all.
And on the fourth day…
Imogen Ward was buying lunch when the past caught up with her.
It wasn’t a restaurant per se. Each day, some of the better cooks made food for everyone, and although they were friendly enough that they didn’t exactly charge for it, it was understood that you didn’t simply take the food without some compensation. Money worked, but the witch had taken the extra step of purchasing from her pirate connections various items which people in Ailos wanted, saving them the difficulty of sourcing it. Today, she’d presented a set of spices to the overjoyed chefs, enough to satisfy her obligation for weeks.
It was with that glow of a job well-done that she sat to enjoy her meal- only to be interrupted by screams.
The witch leapt to her feet and began running for the sounds of sudden commotion, her sword at once in her hand. There weren’t many monsters on Ailos, the island having been tamed by the Dawnmartyrs before the Imperials broke it, but that didn’t mean there were no dangers. Well, lucky for them, Imogen Ward was in town. There was no monsters too big for…
Imogen skidded around a corner and found herself face-to-face with…
"What the fuck" she said, her tone disbelieving, "What the fuck are you doing here?"
The primal had entered the town, apparently simply stalking in through the streets in broad daylight. There were wide gashes in the stones behind it, and more than one collapsed stone shelter, the probable results of some unlucky soul disturbing the Silent Fisher as it hunted.
Imogen brought her sword up in a guard before her disbelieving epithet had left her mouth; this saved her life. The Silent Fisher’s claw tore through the air, fast as Norani’s lightning, and struck with the same force as a hydra.
The orkhan woman was hurled backwards, and would have crashed into a stone hut if she hadn’t immediately thrown herself into slipspace, phasing harmlessly through the walls and rolling eight feet into the street beyond. She pushed herself to her feet just in time to see the squat building collapse as Kegumu tore through it, empty eyes absolutely intent on her.
She had a hundred questions. What the fuck was it doing here? How the fuck had it found her? There was no time for any of them. Imogen took off in a run.
The primal ran faster than any ork, but the witch wasn’t any ork. She filled herself with the totem of the great cat, racing down the street at speed which would put a horse to shame as her angry pursuer began to fall away-
Screams filled the air as the enraged Primal smashed through a cart, and they were cut short. Imogen ground to a halt, realizing:
If I escape it here, it’s going to kill people. Maybe it already has.
That thought chilled her. She wasn’t unfamiliar with death, but she also wasn’t willing to run away and let the mythical horror cause a massacre. She was going to have to draw the monster out of the Citadel and its surrounds.
Imogen turned around, summoning Metallabzieher to her left hand. Even though her summer-blessed skin didn’t burn at the superheated dagger’s touch, she felt scales instinctively crawling down her arm, seeking to protect her.
Kegumu Rekaka had turned away from her pursuit for a moment as it destroyed the cart, and that moment gave her time enough to assail it with a half-dozen copies of the mystic dagger, which shot away from her and slammed into the primal like shots from an Imperial arquebus. The primal reared, pain evident- but as before, none of her weapons found any real purchase.
”Still not humble, huh?” she muttered, eyeing her surroundings to make her next plan, ”Try something else, then.”
With the primal’s attention on her once more, Imogen rushed the thing. Metallabzieher grew hotter and hotter, nearly to the point where it was uncomfortable even given her layers of blessings, the marble blackening and burning below her. Kegumu’s eyes tracked the hated dagger, presumably remembering that it was the one thing she could do which could actually hurt it.
Two meters away from the Silent Fisher, and Imogen suddenly stopped hurling Metallabzieher into the air. The golden dagger and its ruddy glow sailed upwards, and the primal glanced away from the ork, distracted.
Imogen took her chance and tackled the Primal. While she’d learned the hard way that every muscle in her body wasn’t enough to shift the thing more than a few inches, a few inches would have to do. She invoked Traversion, and both Sunsinger and primal vanished.
Metallabzieher tumbled lazily back down into the street, melting a hole through the worn rock before fizzling away into aether. It was several more minutes before the crowds had the courage to come back out and discover the aftermath of the brawl.
She dreamed of a dark chamber, like those she’d known in ages long past. In the dream, she was small and frail; everything seemed too big, and her every movement came slowly and gracelessly. When she opened her eyes, they could hardly make out anything in the shadows.
What a strange thing to dream of, after all this time.
When the witch awoke the next morning, she felt like shit.
Her arms seemed heavy as she pushed herself upright, still not totally used to the concave bed, and her head throbbed with the tell-tale pangs of dehydration. When she managed to force herself upright, her spine was stiff and her skin seemed oddly sensitive.
Kitty–who was characteristically useless as an alarm clock due to his nocturnal preferences–jolted awake next to her and began to nudge, clearly signaling a desire for breakfast. The witch forced herself to her feet, wobbling a bit.
"Fuck me." she muttered, wincing as her raspy voice hurt her own ears. "Did I come down sick with sommat?"
There was no answer from Kitty, who was not a trained physician in any event. She set about trying to clean herself up enough to be presentable outside, stopping only to check on the sword she’d left leaning there. Memories of the ritual from yesterday bubbled up in her mind.
"I guess feeling like shit is one of the aspects of life, sometimes." she sighed, "Well, I doubt it’s serious. Come o-urgh!"
Imogen lifted a hand and summoned her sword to it, then grunted in surprise. Even that act of magic was weirdly… heavy. There was an unexpected exertion to this, the most basic act of Reaving, the like of which she hadn’t experienced since shortly after initiation.
The witch lifted her shirt to look at the Cardinal Runes emblazoned upon her chest. The clear lines of the Rune of Reaving looked the same as ever. But on the other breast, where the totems of Animus were engraved…
~~~
She dreamt of a ruin, so alike to the one she always dreamt of- but this one was filled with noise. Orkhan moved about with purpose as she walked through the ruin, sitting in lean-tos or chatting in shattered boulevards. Even in the midst of memories of bygone glories, they seemed… optimistic. Hopeful. Peaceful.
Even in her dreams, they walked smiling to uncertain graves.
The witch blinked. "Is that even possible?"
“Well, there was a time I would have said no.” the healer admitted, “But I think we’ve got to consider the possibility.”
"You think my aether is simply… draining away?" Imogen asked, baffled "It’s got to go somewhere, hasn’t it? Am I leaking?"
“Not to my eyes, but I’m not the Sembler I was in my youth. I wonder if it might relate to that, though…?”
The woman tapped the marking on Imogen’s breast which should have signified a totem, but instead was simply a broken mess of symbols.
“Have you tried invoking it?”
"A little. Nothing happens, though. Clearly the totem did not… uh, work."
Neither Imogen nor the healer knew what that meant, though. The Cardinal Runes were some of the most complex types of magic, and the ones bestowed upon the mortal races by the dragon gods themselves tended to be pretty, well… user-friendly? If a mage couldn’t encompass a totem, it should simply have failed to work, perhaps leading to some level of overstepping. It shouldn’t break the Rune.
“Hmm.” the healer said, plainly unsure what other advice to give, “Maybe this is just overstepping. Or some ailment you picked up out there. I would suggest trying bed rest like any other illness- and if that doesn’t work, you’ll have to go to Drathera and get one of the Green Dragonflight to examine that.”
"Sadly, I can’t spend too much time asleep for the next few days." the ritual wouldn’t do shit if all it transmitted was the inside of her bedroom, "Any risks, do you think?"
The healer frowned, cocking her head as she assessed Imogen’s aura. “You have plenty of power, much more aether than most of the people I’ve treated. Even if the drain gets worse, it ought to be a while before it begins to harm your health seriously. Just don’t do anything fancy. Use as little magic as possible for a while.”
"Of course," the witch said, nodding, "that shouldn’t be too difficult."
~~~
For the next four days, Imogen focused her attention on living life.
She’d expected that to be a little difficult, confined to the little community living on the Isle of Dawn, but it wasn’t. Sure, they didn’t have a theater where she could watch any great works of art, but there were plenty of people willing to tell stories in the evening. There were no eateries, but plenty of orks willing to share recipes and tables.
Most of the first day was dedicated to playing with children. That might seem like something of a waste of time, but it’s a valuable service in every community, and having someone older than the older children around to tell them new stories was a valuable commodity. A few days of entertaining a child was worth a meal at their family’s hearth, so you didn’t even need to keep a very large group occupied for it to be worthwhile.
The second day was for a different sort of play. In many communities, the older kids would have joined the Shield Legions and been trained to fight–something of a valuable experience in exchange for their service–and many here had, but on Ailos they couldn’t simply send all the older children away. It was too far out from Drathera, and there were still things on the island which required a certain amount of ready force.
While Imogen wasn’t looking for an apprentice at this time, she remained a master swordswoman, and quite skilled with an entire array of weapons. She had her trainees come out and drill in a block, walking along the edges to observe their form. She had no weapons to give them, but most families in Ecith kept some to hand, be they bows, bludgeons, swords or other, stranger implements for which she had no name.
Of course, you could only do so much in a single afternoon, but she didn’t really know how long she’d be staying on the island, and if she could leave it just a little better-defended than she’d found it…?
One of the things she’d wondered, of course, was if any of the Dawnmartyrs remained. People were cagey about the subject, and with good cause; it had been well-known for the last twenty years that the open presence of the Order could draw hunters from the Imperium. But some of the youth here showed signs of real training, and she suspected that perhaps those with more promise had been taken elsewhere entirely.
She didn’t press. Nobody was paying her to investigate the secrets of the old Dawnmartyrs, after all.
That dream was the most frustrating yet, sending ripples of discontent through her mind. To rebuild like this was folly. The worst sort of folly. Children and training were needed, yes, but you could not focus on restoring the life of a land until you’d shored up the defenses which had failed it the first time. You could waste a lifetime raising the Citadel of Light back to the glory it once knew under Arcas, and its enemies could knock it back down in a day. Folly.
The third day, Imogen decided to devote to a little exploration and sightseeing. The ruins of the Citadel were extensive, and her magic gave her a unique opportunity to glimpse it at the height of its grandeur.
The Ork spent hours between dawn and dusk simply wandering the ruins, occasionally pressing the tip of her sword to a rock and glimpsing the things it had seen before being reduced to rubble. Unlike her sudden and extensive flashbacks with the dragon or the fallen wonder of the Boundless Empire, these came only as flashes, devoid of context:
Here, two Dawnmartyr orkhan spent some time chatting as the sun fell, one leaning against a brilliant marble terrace. The other stepped in tentatively, to lay a hand on the small of his back.
There, a group of young knights watched as a man with a supple silver mustache demonstrated one of the principles of Reaving, imbuing an arrow with twisting purple Aether before nocking his bow and firing an ethereal snake heavensward-
In this corner, a stage remembered, that Arcas had stood upon it, though not in the form which Imogen remembered. It was somewhat baffling to see such a familiar figure appear in so different a body.
And here, a bench, miraculously untouched, recalled one knight sitting upon it, a breathtakingly beautiful Orkhan woman wearing only a sheer fabric shift and dazzling rainbow scales-
The witch blinked, belatedly recognizing her own grandmother. Not looking as she’d ever known her, but a perfect fit for the little illustration her father had kept with him on his postings. "Wait," she pleaded with nothing, “Her, show me her again-"
But she knew that wasn’t how the magic worked, and she was correct. No amount of poking (literally) around in the past of that small boulevard turned up another memory of the woman. Unfortunate, but to be expected; it was unbelievable luck that she found even one glimpse. She wondered if it would be kept somewhere within the Lorestone mounted on the sword, to be dug up later, or if it was gone forever.
The itinerant Sunsinger spent some more time wandering around and watching flickering ghosts, but nothing particularly stuck out to her. Fear, anger, promises, love, loss, hope… the spectrum of mortal emotion played out in flickers, but other than the aesthetics it was nothing you couldn’t see in any village.
Maybe that was the lesson for her. These heroes of old had just been people, after all.
And on the fourth day…
~~~
Imogen Ward was buying lunch when the past caught up with her.
It wasn’t a restaurant per se. Each day, some of the better cooks made food for everyone, and although they were friendly enough that they didn’t exactly charge for it, it was understood that you didn’t simply take the food without some compensation. Money worked, but the witch had taken the extra step of purchasing from her pirate connections various items which people in Ailos wanted, saving them the difficulty of sourcing it. Today, she’d presented a set of spices to the overjoyed chefs, enough to satisfy her obligation for weeks.
It was with that glow of a job well-done that she sat to enjoy her meal- only to be interrupted by screams.
The witch leapt to her feet and began running for the sounds of sudden commotion, her sword at once in her hand. There weren’t many monsters on Ailos, the island having been tamed by the Dawnmartyrs before the Imperials broke it, but that didn’t mean there were no dangers. Well, lucky for them, Imogen Ward was in town. There was no monsters too big for…
Imogen skidded around a corner and found herself face-to-face with…
"What the fuck" she said, her tone disbelieving, "What the fuck are you doing here?"
Among the primals, there were those who were considered more or less threatening by the combined Dragonflights of Ecith.
Ord Kruv, for example, was practically harmless as long as you didn’t literally fly in front of him. Likewise Unkoe H'uvi'uvd, though he was more of a problem for the settlements of the orkhan. Then there were real monsters.
Kegumu Rekaka was not the strongest primal, and it was not the fastest, or the most destructive. It mostly hunted at night, and disturbed settlements rarely. But from time to time, it decided to hunt a dragon, and when it did…
The primal had entered the town, apparently simply stalking in through the streets in broad daylight. There were wide gashes in the stones behind it, and more than one collapsed stone shelter, the probable results of some unlucky soul disturbing the Silent Fisher as it hunted.
Imogen brought her sword up in a guard before her disbelieving epithet had left her mouth; this saved her life. The Silent Fisher’s claw tore through the air, fast as Norani’s lightning, and struck with the same force as a hydra.
The orkhan woman was hurled backwards, and would have crashed into a stone hut if she hadn’t immediately thrown herself into slipspace, phasing harmlessly through the walls and rolling eight feet into the street beyond. She pushed herself to her feet just in time to see the squat building collapse as Kegumu tore through it, empty eyes absolutely intent on her.
She had a hundred questions. What the fuck was it doing here? How the fuck had it found her? There was no time for any of them. Imogen took off in a run.
The primal ran faster than any ork, but the witch wasn’t any ork. She filled herself with the totem of the great cat, racing down the street at speed which would put a horse to shame as her angry pursuer began to fall away-
Screams filled the air as the enraged Primal smashed through a cart, and they were cut short. Imogen ground to a halt, realizing:
If I escape it here, it’s going to kill people. Maybe it already has.
That thought chilled her. She wasn’t unfamiliar with death, but she also wasn’t willing to run away and let the mythical horror cause a massacre. She was going to have to draw the monster out of the Citadel and its surrounds.
Imogen turned around, summoning Metallabzieher to her left hand. Even though her summer-blessed skin didn’t burn at the superheated dagger’s touch, she felt scales instinctively crawling down her arm, seeking to protect her.
Kegumu Rekaka had turned away from her pursuit for a moment as it destroyed the cart, and that moment gave her time enough to assail it with a half-dozen copies of the mystic dagger, which shot away from her and slammed into the primal like shots from an Imperial arquebus. The primal reared, pain evident- but as before, none of her weapons found any real purchase.
”Still not humble, huh?” she muttered, eyeing her surroundings to make her next plan, ”Try something else, then.”
With the primal’s attention on her once more, Imogen rushed the thing. Metallabzieher grew hotter and hotter, nearly to the point where it was uncomfortable even given her layers of blessings, the marble blackening and burning below her. Kegumu’s eyes tracked the hated dagger, presumably remembering that it was the one thing she could do which could actually hurt it.
Two meters away from the Silent Fisher, and Imogen suddenly stopped hurling Metallabzieher into the air. The golden dagger and its ruddy glow sailed upwards, and the primal glanced away from the ork, distracted.
Imogen took her chance and tackled the Primal. While she’d learned the hard way that every muscle in her body wasn’t enough to shift the thing more than a few inches, a few inches would have to do. She invoked Traversion, and both Sunsinger and primal vanished.
Metallabzieher tumbled lazily back down into the street, melting a hole through the worn rock before fizzling away into aether. It was several more minutes before the crowds had the courage to come back out and discover the aftermath of the brawl.
It was, admittedly, exciting to see a fight again. Bold Orkhan hero against the Silent Fisher, the flash of light-blessed steel against invincible pinions… yes, she’d missed that.
It was a shame that it wouldn’t last much longer.