Interlude I: The Master From The Old Tower
Druids, Jade Wizards, Men of the Order of Life, Agrological Thaumaturgists… Bah! Humbug all of it! Hedge mages, is what they are, literally! Farmers with overgrown egos and a lucky spark for the winds of magic. It is offensive to compare us to them, whose abilities stop at being able to make plants -plants!- Grow fast and crops bigger and little else. Mages the peasants call them! As if four leafed clovers could stand to us who wield fate with our very hands and sight!
-Rant by Bartholomäus Frederick Nepomuk Adelwandsteiner-Bold, tenured professor and Seer of the Celestial College. Recorded by Bartolomi Kereveld in his diary.
Near the Freddo River’s Course, Port Reaver’s Western Plantations, Port Reaver, Settler’s Cove
17th of Vorgeheim, 2538 IC /40.0.9.11.14 6 Ix 7 Xul
The changes of the newly started dry season have made themselves clearly seen to the people of Port Reaver. Indeed it has rained only a few times in the weeks following the change of seasons, and the ground is quickly becoming stable enough to work on what few construction projects there are in the city. These projects are few, first because repairing months of deterioration and sinking into the ground for the older buildings takes priority, second because there’s simply no interest or perceived value in constructing anything new.
Instead, all that interest is centered on the dockyards. Because as Stefan’s sore legs have made him relearn, dry season means reaving season. Which translated to the sudden arrival of more ships than what the harbor and felldowns combined can manage, with the Mazza and Scurso bays choking with ships and even more dotting the cove as far as the eye could see.
Stefan had always known this to be, he was a local after all. Less rain meant less treacherous terrain, less risk of sicknesses, less mud traps and things hiding in the muddy shallows. Or at least that he had heard from the coming and going men, Stefan has never walked beyond the treeline himself. As far as he cares, the clogging rains and roasting sun make for equally miserable weather.
But there was a difference between seeing how the traffic would considerably swell for half the year due to this change in the rains and heat, and being involved with it. Before he had liked the dry season for reasons other than the heat itself, it meant more plunderers to steal from arriving every day and more packed streets to weave through during his escapes.
Now he hates it, because more pirates means more ships that need supplying and repairs, much more work coming and going from the Felldown’s chandlers. Now he really understood why Master De Curiel had taken him in with little questioning. He was one of more than a dozen courier and errand lads and he still felt like he was running ragged. The massed streets that he had made use of so much now constantly delayed him, somehow being most packed whenever he was given the most speed-needing dispatches. The streets filled with men looking to buy supplies or manpower before leaving. Or returning and looking to sell the first collections of loot, or to spend said wealth in what little Port Reaver offers, or to get supplies to make the Great Ocean crossing.
Whatever it is, they do business with the chandlers and suppliers of the city, and that means Stefan is spending every waking moment running somewhere. He’s gone from knowing his way through the backstreets and hays of Port Reaver’s core to knowing every beaten dirty road beyond the new city walls, be it on the east where there’s actual walls or the west where the workshops just lead into open farming fields.
He’s in one of the latter right now, just having run past the Pozza, the old lagoon that had supplied Port Reaver with freshwater in its early years. Now, and for much longer than Stefan has even been alive, it's a brackish and polluted thing. Why would people use it to dispose of all manner of things when the sea is within eyesight the kid doesn’t really get. But the point is he can see birds on long stilt-like legs picking at what refuse people threw in earlier this morning and he has no interest in taking a sip or a bath with the hogs sitting in its shallows.
Beyond the Pozza there’s a good stretch that is just plantations to the right and small pens to the left. Small indeed, not much cattle in Port Reaver, just explorer’s horses waiting to be moved out or the odd oxen outside of tilling season munching on the grasses.
None of the cabins and sheds he encounters are his objective. He keeps walking until he reaches an area of cleared jungle not used for food. Instead it’s simply an area of bare earth that spends most of the year as a quagmire. Created by a combination of abundant rains, the nearby and often flooded Freddo river and the fact that the ground here is often overturned and dug up.
It’s not a quarry, at least not in the way he knows them to exist in the Old World. It’s not rock or metal that is torn from the rock with pickaxes. That simply doesn’t exist here.
No, it’s bone that workers -slaves- dig up here from the red soil and mud. Massive bones that is, some are big enough that it takes years to dig them up. Stefan remembers that ribcage sticking out of the ground, as tall as two stories and buried deep enough that the rest of the carcass, if there’s one, is still deeply buried under the waterlogged clearing.
The Thunderlizard Boneyard is one of the few local and true exports of the city. Everything else is just cargo moving in or out of the New World. But every single day that the weather permits it men go out to the boneyard to continue digging up the valuable skeletons of massive creatures Stefan is happy no never have seen alive. As he arrives, a team of six branded men are loading onto a cart what he at first assumes to be leg bones, but their amount soon proves to be
fingerbones.
Stefan is there to deliver a message to their taskmaster. He doesn’t know why his master, a ship outfitter, deals with people who sell bones but he also knows not to waste time inquiring. So he just gives the pieces of paper (written over dozens of times and now almost without space for new missives) and catches his breath resting his back against the shadow offered by what looks like a vertebra the size of an anvil. A part of him remembers that the only reason he recognizes the bones by shape was the diet he was offered at the orphanage, a place where getting stew made from the bones of a dead horse’s tail bones made for celebratory delicacies.
He’s happy he ended up buying himself those shoes, but right now he loves his waterskin even more. It’s a bit ratty, but it has no holes, so he’s able to take as many gulps of water as he wants to without waste. If only it was as cold as when he had gotten it from the well early in the morning.
He waits for a few more minutes as the taskmaster and another man, maybe another foreman or the bonayard’s owner, have a heated discussion. He ignores their words and enjoys the light breeze that picks up.
He’s sitting looking west towards the Freddo, mostly because with it being morning, that’s where the bone’s shadow covers him.
The Freddo river makes up Port Reaver’s western boundary. A widening of it, almost a lake, of calm waters makes up the northwestern boundary of Port Reaver’s cleared out area. Stefan watches as a group of men slowly sails down it on rafts made from and pulling entire tree trunks. The logging camp which supplies the entirety of Port Reaver but especially the Felldown shipyards lies directly north up the Freddo’s course. Convenient seeing as to how the river’s mouth is at the Felldowns. Stefan himself has never visited the logging camp.
The logging camp is beyond the treeline, and he’s not a fool.
There’s also people gathered there. Women gathering water or cleaning clothes, men fishing. And children playing on the water’s edge. They must be the children of craftsmen and merchants to have the luxury of play, he notes with envy. A privilege he and the rest of the orphans -who outnumber the fostered children by an unhealthy margin- don’t get.
A part of him feels resentment, but he quells it pretty fast. After all, they are just a father’s infected wound or unpaid debt from poverty. Or a mother’s fever away from Saint Sissy’s. Orphans don’t grow on trees, and there’s a lot of whys as to them outnumbering the other children.
All in all, Stefan has a very good, but specially safe, viewpoint of what happens next.
It starts with a child’s cries. And by child Stefan doesn’t mean a fourteen year old like himself pushing young manhood. He hears what sounds like a toddler’s cries. What’s worse is that it’s not a toddler crying in the way toddlers tend to cry all day long. It’s a toddler’s cries in the way that makes one think of the worst.
The light crowd at the water’s edge, the ferrying loggers and the boneyard serfs all move to get a better view of what might be going on. Stefan gets up and precariously stands up on top of the vertebra to get a better view. The crowd congeals and some of the fishing men get up to act on it.
But then it breaks the water surface, and the crying grows too deafening to come from a child’s lungs, too droning to come from a human’s lungs at all.
It breaches from under one of the log bundles, making a couple of the oar-wielding men lose their footing and one fall into the water. The shape moves forward half-swimming and half-galloping.
Bands of black and white blur into a long body of gray that lunges for the crowd. Said crowd obscures Stefan’s view. But the people scream and the crows disperses like a rotting fruit under a man’s boot. The shape is visible again as it turns around with an explosion of foaming water. Reeds and water plants go flying as it completely changes course for the opposite direction, back towards the Freddo.
The last thing Stefan sees is the entirely too small human shape its tail is curled around. But a blink later the sinuous appendage and the child’s body also disappear. People are screaming, most of all an anguished woman who wades into the water, collapsing as she loses her footing on the mud. She bites and fights back as one of the men, the logger who was shaken from his simple raft, wrestles her back out of the no longer calm lake waters.
“Kid!” Someone, the taskmaster Stefan realizes, shouts. He turns around and jumps off the vertebrae spurs. The man pushes the paper back into his chest.
“Get this to
el Curiel!” He commands. “But first go to the Ċittadella,get whoever looks the most important, the constable, or the head guard I don’t give a shit! And tell them we just had a damned water daemon attack!” The man orders hurriedly, Stefan’s hand clutches the piece of paper, crumpling it.
He wants to ask questions, a bunch of them, such as “what the hell just happened?” or “who am I supposed to talk to?” or chief of all “what the hells just happened?!” but the man doesn’t afford him the chance.
He pushes Stefan, and when that elicits no running he grabs a handful of Stefan’s dark blonde hair and uses it to awkwardly pull him into running forwards. Stefan’s legs do the rest as his instincts kick into motion, It’s a simple issue really, pain elicits a desire to escape, and escape here means orders.
Soon enough he’s sprinting eastwards across the tobacco and cotton fields, parallel to the walls until he goes through the Sprania gate.
Then all he has to do is run the entirety of Port Reaver’s main road into Re Island. Usually he would complain about having to take the busiest and most constricting roadway. But the image of a child being pulled underwater not to surface again makes for a good enough incentive.
The Ċittadella, Re Island, Port Reaver, Settler’s Cove
The wooden bridge to Re island is guarded, but the guards don’t spot him, or ask him why he’s so hurried. They are mostly there to keep the peace and handle the constant stream of people crossing in both directions. There’s all kinds of people who, like him, have something to do related to the king’s fortress. All manner of things, merchants carrying their wares to sell, workers bringing in supplies. Captains and first mates are coming and going with offers or demands. Quartermasters as well, some to establish bounties, some to demand they be overturned and some to claim rewards for bounties in the name of their crews. And for each one of those, there’s twice the amount of more people, workers and sailors leaving or going to the ships moored in Re’s northwestern limits, which makes up off of the arms of the half-moon shaped harbor.
And there’s a lot of people also heading for farther into Re, mostly sailors and locals. The Sunken Cloister draws them in. All in all the bridge is only slightly less crowded than the streets he’s made his way through to get here.
Map of Re Island: Historic home of Port Reaver’s Pirate Lords and their ancient Ċittadella fortress (1) along sides the equally old Trident, one of Port Reaver’s two lighthouses and entrance to the Sunken Cloister, a subterranean temple complex underneath the seafloor of Port Reaver's harbor dedicated to Stromfels and Manann. The Island is connected on the west with a wooden bridge to the harbor and key locations such as the Doganale House (2) and rebuilt Grails District (7). On the East, Re Island is protected by Barricata Island on the entrance to Mazza Bay.
However, the looming shape of the fortress, with its four massive towers and walls of gray and weathered stone, begets a question Stefan hasn’t considered asking yet.
“Now what?”
After all, he’s never visited the Ċittadella before, he has no idea what to do to get in or who constitutes “someone important” in the fortress, he’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to get in touch with King Borg himself. And he’s got no idea what a constable is or if a head guard looks any different from a normal guard. As far as he knows the guards are just pirates who no longer sail, and yet aren’t considered stragglers, and get to get away with shaking people up or beating them up, how are they supposed to help with a daemon-kidnapping?
Stefan realizes he doesn’t even know how to get in. Will the guards just let him walk in like at the bridge? He doesn’t feel like they would. Usually he just catches people in their workshops or waits by office doors after knocking.
Is he supposed to knock on the massive portcullis? That doesn’t feel right either. There’s a smaller and open door built into the structure of the closed fortress gates, and that one is open. Does he knock on that one? Does he walk in on what he assumes is a patio?
“Sorry, uh… I was told I needed to talk with the ‘constable’?” Eventually he settled for just asking the guardsmen.
“You aren’t one of our usual message boys, who sent you?” One of them asks.
“I… Uh.” The memory of the hectic attack way too short a time ago breaks up his train of thought. “There’s been an attack!” He managed under the stare of the men, they don’t look angry or bothered by him yet, mostly just annoyed at having to deal with him.
“So? We are not the only guards in the city, you know? You could have gotten any of the patrols instead of us.” The man answers admonishingly.
“No, no it was a… A Daemon! Water Beast”
That 's it. That’s all it takes for everyone who hears him to come to a full stop. It’s taken young Stefan entirely too long but the reality finally catches up to him. He’s just been witness to an ahuizotl, a waterborne aberration even by lustrian standards, taking a child not much younger than himself.
“Never swim in the calm lakes, Ahuizotl's home is underneath the calm lakes, if you swim too far from the edge his tail will grab you and pull you down.” He vaguely remembers in a maternal but faded voice he can ascribe no face to.
The guardsmen quickly change in demeanor. “Get the kid talking, I’ll get everyone else.” One of them orders before turning for the threshold. Around Stefan the crowd grows agitated. There’s not been an attack for more than a year after the last round-ups. The guard who stays indeed grills him for information.
Who sends him? Where did it happen? How many people were there? How long did it take him to get to the Ċittadella? Weren’t there any patrols he could have told on his way?
The question continues as the crowd grows rowdier and calls and shouted orders leave the fortress.
The final question of “How many children did it take?” Is answered as they are forced to move aside by the gates opening with a crackling of wood and scraping of unused hinges and pulleys. The man’s expression turns grateful when he answers with “I only saw one.”
Then the men, guardsmen, start walking out in a loose formation. They are ex-pirates, every rankman in Port Reaver, including the Stragglers, who isn’t a dog of war is an ex-pirate. But most ex-pirates are
ex because they no longer make for good pirates.
That’s not the case for the city or king’s guard. They are such good pirates, Stefan has heard, that they do not have to be pirates anymore. Just like how the king used to be such a good captain he gets to not command a ship anymore, commanding Port Reaver instead.
They look the part, all dressed in different clothes and bits of armors but all in the same colors, strips of red and white. Many wear pins or have the same symbol embroidered onto their chests. The king’s laughing board on a gold coin. Stefan remembers back when it was all black clothes and an ax-wielding skeleton. And even before when they wore checkered greens and yellows with a coiled seadrake. Or even the one month when they didn’t have the time to make “uniforms” and simply made themselves seen with white clocks. None have lasted as long as the red-and-white stripes of the smiling and tusked skull.
They don’t all carry the same weapons, but they all carry the same types of weapons. Only a few of them have flintlocks, but all the flintlocks are on identical holsters. Half have cutlasses which look identical, the other half have boarding axes, knives, daggers or clubs somewhere on their person. A couple even have bigger pistols or bandoliers of round gray balls and he even spots an arquebus slung on the back of a man who's talking with…
“Stromfels…” Stefan can’t help but mutter.
The man is dressed in the finest clothes Stefan has ever seen. Much better than any pirate lord he’s sneaked a look at or any merchant he carried messages to or from. The clothes are also mostly white and red but much less garish or eye-seraring. Instead it's the quality of the material that gives him off.
Long coat despite the heat, a muted but noticeable red in color. Under that Stefan can see an impeccable white cotton shirt and hole-less trousers held by a leather belt with large holsters to it. A large red sash tied over the man’s coat around his belly draws Stefan’s sight upwards again, where he finds the scarred face of a man with a long and voluminous beard staring back with brown, deeply angry, eyes shaded by a bicorn hat decorated and threaded with what look like tusks.
“Is he the one who brought the alarm?” King Bastjan Borg himself asks. Stefan realizes it’s not that the King asks him, but the guard who had disappeared into the gates and who was now standing by their king.
The curt “It is, my king.” Earns a grunt and a quickly given order, “We take him with us, I want all the information we can get.”
With that the man with the long musket gives an order in a tongue Stefan doesn’t know. And the gathered men, more than fifty, start marching out and pushing and dissolving the crowd. King at the head like a raging boar. Stefan doesn’t need to be ordered to follow. At least he’s grateful that following the guardsmen means not dealing with the mashed streets twice in such a short span of time. The gate’s guard walks side by side with him.
“And someone get me the fucking huntsmen NOW!” Belows the King’s voice, on the opposite side of the column but still easily breaking the cacophony of a city suddenly in high alert.
Port Reaver is a ruthless place, but it tends to forget the cursed land surrounding it.
A Ts’ono’ot Near Port Reaver, Settler’s Cove
18th of Vorgeheim, 2538 IC /40.0.9.11.15 7 Men 8 Xul
The cenote is not too dissimilar from the thousands of others that dot the isthmus’ jungles. Natural pits, sinkholes, resulting from the collapse of limestone bedrock after thousands of years of weathering which exposed groundwater. The Lizardmen, who call these inundated pits tsʼono’ots, have used them as sources of clean water or to sacrifice much to the Old One Tzunki for a very long time as well.
But not all of them, because not all of these open-air pools of deep water are made equal. Many are open-water pools of murky waters, inhabited by plenty of common fish and amphibians, frequented watering holes. Most are connected by long and complex cave systems, spreading all over Lustria’s underground like the hollows left by the roots of a missing tree the size of the world. These would make for a great Lustrian Underway, were it not for their inundated and twisting tunnels, covered in rocky outcrops, stalagmites and stalactites which act like the writing tentacles of a grasping cephalopodic monster.
But some are even worse, by account of their inhabitants. They are home to deceptively clear waters, shining like mirrors of aquamarine and topaz when undisturbed, which can only be reached at the bottom of sheer rock walls in the thin-necked shape of a great jar. Pools of cold water where the sun only reaches with the midday hours, pools too treacherous to enter or leave by climbing. Some of these are purely dangerous by their unpredictable shapes, for their walls are home to little more than huntipedes or bats, and their waters are home to fish and amphibians which cannot snatch anything much larger than the rare fallen bird.
But some -few, rare and isolated from one another as they are- are worse, much worse. Worse than even the occasional case of a larger animal stepping too close to a cenote’s entrance, triggering a partial collapse and widening of the sinkhole and dooming itself to a watery death. Even worse than this death by fall-and-drowning, something lurks.
A forgotten remnant of a war of armies the size of nations. Of stellar artillery and gaping toothed ravines like open wounds in reality. The Great Cataclysm is the name it possesses in High Saurian. In the Book of Grudges it is recorded, remembered as the beginning of the saga known as the Doom of Grimnir. All elves, irregardless of bloodline, creed or allegiance, remember it as the aberrant forge whose fire cast Aenarion the Defender and the Great Vortex into existence. Only the most ancient of man’s records remember the forgotten age of the Great Catastrophe, Nehekhara remembers it proudly, for its gods were born in nothing else but the hundred year long battles for the River of Life against horrors dwelling under the sands. Terrifyingly common is the fact that most human nations retale their histories to the end of great migrations whose triggers are blessedly forgotten. It is not extreme to state that the evils and maladies of the world are all the scarred tissue of this ancient stab to the world’s heart.
One such malady breaks the surface of one such forbidden tsʼono’ot, it has arrived here through the labyrinthine web of inundated tunnels from the rivers whose contours make its feeding grounds. Its long limbs, ending in too-human four fingered hands of claw-nails, grasps onto the limestone, allowing it to pull itself up to the ledge on the sinkhole wall it calls a nest.
A body follows it, an entirely too tiny head firmly grasped by the appendage armid the thing’s tail. The body of the long-drowned child is dropped onto the ledge unceremoniously, the beast will rest for a bit before enjoying a meal of cold and wet flesh.
It has swum here quickly, a long sinuous body allowing it to use even the most narrow crevices of the cave systems. Lanky limbs have propelled it all the way there and back. Despite how thin they might seem, or how their slightly uneven lengths give it a tumbling gait, they have an unnatural strength and dexterity to them.
The animal shakes itself like a parody of a wet pup. Its fur is in a marbled gray and black pattern, but patches of bristles and quills break up any illusion of a healthy or natural pelt. Horn-like growths are visible among the aerated fur, they grow at the hips, the tail-tip, the left flank and shoulder, the top of the head as well. Not a single one is of even shape or length, they grow like too many plants in a small pot, bidding for space in the flesh and skin.
Pustules, which can be found all over the face and major joints, pop and gush as it scratches its head with a hindlimb. Its stare is absent and gaze is lost. It seems not to even notice as one of the sacs, so big and close to the socket that it has malformed the eye, explodes with yellow filth and covers the now decompressing eye in a film of piggery. The vacant stare combines with a long-hinged mouth of fang-shaped molars in a creepily absent smile.
Meanwhile, a massive tail as long as the body itself writhes and grabs with a mind of its own. The three-fingered hand on its tip opens and closes randomly. The three fingers, arranged like a triangle, find purchase in the bones of an old hunt, the skull of a smallish hydrodon. The teeth growth in the hand-tail’s palm gnaw at the weathered bone with underdeveloped tendons pulling and releasing them, the palm releases a substance half saliva and half urine. It tries to eat, but there’s no mouth, much less a throat or stomach to swallow. The tail indeed has a mind of its own, a mind condemned to starvation.
The thing eventually picks up its real meal, a long tongue forked like bush branches licks with the texture of shark-skin as the mutant enjoys a meal. It shall eat all, clothes included. It always eats everything when it snatches a human child. It doesn’t know why, why should it? The instincts of something that deals in the warped metaphysical cannot be expected to pilot a body of flesh with anything other than chaotic zeal.
It will leave a single item uneaten however. It doesn’t know why, but this ahuizotl, this water daemon, shall swallow all bones but the skull, which it will break to consume the mind-guts, but otherwise will enormously dump back into the cenote’s water. Whereupon it will meet with hundreds of other human and reptilian skulls at the bottom. Forming a pile the monster knows not the significance of.
It is a filthy, long and thorough process as it consumes. It knows to eat everything it can, because its malformed instincts might simply forget to remind it of hunger and starvation as it swims the cave waters for the following weeks or months. It even has to fight its own tail for the food, biting it until it bleeds while the hand stabs into the real mouth’s gums. But it continues nonetheless.
The process does have a single positive to it, however, it distracts the hulking, scatterbrained and lanky ahuizotl.
The Ahuizotl: One of the last living, and most warped, remnants of the Great Ctastrophe’s stain upon Lustria.
Many of its peers meet their fates at the hands of specially trained Skink patrols. Others get shot by hunters and mercenaries on commission of the warmblooded jarls, pirate kings and governors of the ports where they’ve found their favored meals for hundreds of years. Some even fall prey to Lustria’s own nature, inherently brutal as it is even by a daemon-beast’s standards, this very specific creature’s “mate” was crushed few months ago by the bite of a proterosudon, the crocodilian’s many needle-like teeth puncturing “her'' like a cushion to no reaction from the now lonely man-eater. A few even succumb to the maladies inherent to their mutations by themselves.
This one won’t, for it does not notice as a writhing mass climbs -no, grows- over the lip at the cenote’s top. Tendrils move and grow, falling in like swinging ropes but quickly rooting themselves to the walls upon contact. They keep falling and growing, almost obscuring the cenote, like spilled entrails, continuing their growth. It is an unnatural growth, these vines’, for they grow deeper into the cenote, a direction opposite to what one would expect from any sun-seeking plant.
And yet these do grow down and towards the humid dark at the bottom. Soon one single unassuming vine is upon the ledge seeking a very specific stimulus. The unmistakable stain of chaos upon an unlucky specimen of what millenia ago might have been harmless water-going mammals.
Engrossed in its meal, the ahuizotl doesn’t hear nor feel anything notable as the vines continue to contour and grow into and around the ledge, cupping it and securing themselves, some grow thick and become truly bark-covered trunks for the vine network.
When it comes, the mutant doesn’t feel the attack of constrictive serpents. It knows what such an attack feels like, the sudden bite of the boa followed by the mass of its long body coiling and giving pressure.
It feels like a whipping, like a chain pulled taunt suddenly snapping and swinging with just force as to dig into flesh unluckily located within the arch it swings with.
There’s an attempt to jump, to escape the sudden ambush, but a limb is already held too tightly, bones creaking and stopping the entire body’s momentum. The beast messily falls without leaving the ledge, it does so on top of the half-eaten body. Like revenge, the wetness of spilled blood and guts makes it harder for the monster to move, it tries to pull itself over the ledge with its ape-ish hands, but as its snout touches the waterline it is yanked back.
What follows is minutes of slow, as plant growth is bound to be, and agonizing constriction, suffocation and bone shattering pain. Roots grow into flesh, sapping unclean blood to begin a long process of purification.
It is a horrible, disgusting and absolutely deserved execution.
The skull heap shall not grow anymore.
Old Abandoned Tower, Outskirts of Port Reaver, Settler’s Cove
The comatose body of Cryston von Danling awakes, the old man shudders and coughs as he rises from the cold floor of his study, plants in their pots around him quickly withering due to the vitae he’s been forced to extract from them, suddenly becoming aware again of his entirely too old body. It is taxing to cast his personally modified spells. A combination of elements of Forest of Thorns, Living Mire and Vital Growth spells he’s entirely proud of having managed without getting a tree to grow out of his chest in the process, he doesn’t know who to thank for the most: Lustria’s vast natural pull of Ghyran’ or the bronze triskelion hanging from his necklace, which hums as it overworks its inbuilt protections to fix the insanity of what he’s just done or his own skills.
Casting the Straggling Vines is hard, life threateningly hard, hard enough that he’s seriously considering whether it is worth finally putting the process to writing in his notes for future jade wizards to learn. Especially considering how useless it is against anything other than the most braindead of foes, such as the one he’s just snapped the neck of.
Casting it alongside Lie of the Land and Nature’s Whisper in order to be able to do it remotely. He is honestly expecting to have a heart attack any minute now. Maybe, he laughs with a wheeze, he’s already had it and hasn’t noticed yet.
He doesn’t regret doing it, but is also fully aware that he’s just used the last of his reserves after years of meditative inaction. This is an amount of exhaustion no Fat of the Land spell can fix. Much less having just killed the last of his living conduits.
Luckily, as he walks down the spiraling stairs of his derelict tower, by now a crowd must have gathered to deal with the tragedy he had witnessed hours ago from the observatory’s windows.
A part of him is curious, how many Pirate Kings has he slept and meditated away since he last opened the tower’s gate? Another is dreadful, reminding him that events have begun to unfold much bigger than any innocent child’s dark fate.
But mostly, as he walks out for the first time in decades, he wonders if the King he sees in the dispute will be willing to pay the ahuizotl’s bounty in tower repairs, meals and a new bed or why the young man standing awkwardly by the city’s master has an ethereal bird standing on his shoulder.
