For what had to have been hours, Aleem guided mana through his ducts while practicing mindfulness. He wasn’t using any visualisation techniques, yet his mana coursed through him, soothing his agitated mind.
Once he’d lost himself to the practice, events, both past and future, no longer weighed so heavily on him. His hands too had stopped trembling at some point, and even the sounds of the wagon faded to the background as he kept his attention on his breath and the ‘feel’ of his mana. If Aleem could put a word to the way mana came across to his senses, he’d call it ‘heat’ or ‘warmth climbing its way towards calefaction’. It was potential. Power yet unused.
The wagon had come to a stop several times, though Aleem could hardly tell. The movements and sounds of the wagon had all but ceased to register in his awareness. Almost as though he’d taken the mechanism responsible for modulating his physical senses and dialled it shy of all the way down. If his sensory faculties were a light bulb, it’d be very dim. The reason for this was obviously [Trance]. The Skill had resorted to its habit of activating without his permission, but he left it running.
His eyes were closed, yet notifications hovered in the periphery of his internal awareness. This had happened earlier with Feriona, and he had started to suspect that it was an effect of the [Soul Perception] Skill. In the game, the soul schema had been presented as a barebones interface that scaled in functionality with the user’s insight into their own soul. Aleem would have to check if there were other effects accompanying this.
He took in the block of text.
ALERT
[Meditation] has levelled up!
[Meditation] Level 12
[Mana Sense] has levelled up!
[Mana Sense] Level 3
+2 to Cognition
+1 to Will
It was a welcome reprieve seeing something other than his heart rate go up. In ‘Tales of Woe’ Skills fell into three broad categories of Adequacy, Mastery and Eminence, each one constituting thirty levels. The three categories were further split into two equal sections of ‘low’ and ‘high’. This meant that every one of Aleem’s Skills was still in the low Adequacy subcategory.
Meditation was his highest-levelled Skill, and he was looking forward to moving it into the high adequacy division soon. Skills demonstrated very significant improvement in function and versatility every thirty levels. Transitioning to the ‘high’ subcategory, while not quite as dramatic, also displayed a prominent leap.
[Mana Sense] was rather under-levelled, and he would have to make conscious attempts to improve it. It was too vital a Skill to leave lagging behind. It struck him as a little odd that [Mana Control] had nearly double its levels, though. Something to think over at some other time.
The slight bump to Cognition was not surprising. He’d gained a few levels in [Soul Perception] earlier as well as in [Mana Sense], and it was only natural for the stat that governed his sensory faculties to ride on that. Both Skills did after all seem to constitute an element of his Cognition.
Aleem opened his eyes, immediately noticing how much dimmer the inside of the wagon was. To his right, Hetti lay sideways on the bench that Serend had been sitting on. She covered the entire length of it, her snores louder than those of the Barveyan man lodged beneath Aleem’s own bench. The man was meant to be their driver, Wulry had said, but since he’d been engaged without any prior notice, the thick-bearded man was catching up on sleep.
To his right sat Bebson in Wulry’s place. The white-haired mage-type had both hands lying prostrate on his thighs and his eyes were closed. His back was ramrod straight and not even touching the wall behind him. With both eyes closed, he wore a gentle frown as his chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm. The brown of his loose, light robes matched the interior of the wagon, and for a brief instant there, Bebson had appeared to Aleem’s eyes as a head floating in the air.
R’shai didn’t seem to have moved much in all the time Aleem had been meditating. She sat now, beside Bebson, in assiduous stillness, reading her book under the dusky light provided by her window, through which Aleem could only very barely see the sun dipping into the horizon.
Evening already?
Had he really been meditating for that long? He’d been completely oblivious to the passage of time, something a timepiece might have fixed. A simple problem for the future.
Encompassing the sound of snoring, were wind currents streaming over the windows, the rhythmic pounding of hooves and the muffled squeaking of wagon parts. They were moving at a very sedate pace.
He swayed only slightly in the wagon, making it clear to him that the shock absorption in this particular vehicle was so much better than any he’d been in since coming to Orig, and that conclusion took into account the fact that they’d mostly been plying uneven terrain with it. Still, his butt hurt, and his shoulders were stiff. The bench he sat on was wooden, and even though the jostling of the vehicle was minimal, discomfort was unavoidable, considering how long he’d sat still for.
Apparently, Wulry and Serend were out front, coaching. More Wulry than Serend, Aleem hoped.
He cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders before calling up the logs from his soul schema. The Seeded Directives had been implemented, but he’d put off looking at them till now.
Shadow Affinity has been Unsealed
Non-divulgation Restrictions have been Lifted
Geas-Modelled Soul Shroud has been Retained
He investigated them seriatim.
Shadow Affinity has been Unsealed
A strong affinity for shadow, which has stayed sealed since birth. A limb left unused for too long often loses all functionality, but that is not the case here.
Quite the flavour text.
In ‘Tales of Woe’, the ‘Gorthihi’ were a race of part elemental humanoids, often referred to as ‘shadelings’. They were as alien as any group of people could get on Orig. Their practices and mannerisms were almost inscrutable, and they didn’t even communicate through speech. This had even caused several of their unenlightened neighbours to treat them as monsters and kill them. In some other portions of Orig, Gorthihi were referred to as evil races.
Upon first learning about his strong shadow affinity, Aleem had fraughtly suspected himself to be a half-shadeling. At the time, he’d dreaded so much the thought of being in the body of Akniyano, that he’d latched onto the first least ludicrous improbability. He knew of no other notable Vriorians with shadow affinities, after all.
Interspecial mating was not widely embraced on Orig, least of which in the lower Nilondlic subcontinents like Ontacreese. There’d never been anything like half-shadelings in the game. Aleem didn’t entirely rule out the possibility of such beings existing, but he felt rather certain that he wasn’t one.
His current body didn’t bear any features reminiscent of shadelings. More importantly, though, a character in ‘Tales of Woe’ had once implied that jrjis, or untethered could only come about when both procreators were themselves Vriorian.
‘Sealed since birth’, the description said. Feriona, the [Hag], had claimed that she and two others had secured divine assistance for this body’s former owner. She’d also implied that Gwa.yao.rai had siblings. Aleem wondered about that. Nothing in ’Tales of Woe’ had even remotely hinted at Akniyano’s past. The closest the game had ever come to doing so was having Tanton indirectly assist Sheilu Fir-lilla in tracking down the incarnation.
There was one prominent entity that came to mind when Aleem wondered about who exactly might have placed the Geas and sealed his shadow affinity.
Som.det.
Sheilu Fir-lilla’s play-through had revealed quite a bit about her. She was a godling in the service of the Tutelar goddess, Luxol.
Som.det was one of the longest-lived Vriorians in existence and had disconnected herself from the Grand Coral millennia ago, well before Zraazrondre had attained godhood. She was one of so few truly ancient Vriorians that had successfully done so, and as a jrjis, no less. While she’d been portrayed in the game as privately holding a grudge against their race’s Tutelar goddess, Som.det had never seemed to direct that animus at her fellow Vriorians. She had even come to the [Hag]’s aid on one very specific occasion.
Godlings were some of the most unreasonably narcissistic individuals on Orig, but Som.det was nowhere close to being the worst of the lot. Divine grade geasa could only ever be placed by a Tutelar, though. Which meant that the goddess whom Som.det represented might always have intended to place the geas on his body’s former host. Aleem felt queasy at the thought of earning yet another goddess’s attention. The game had portrayed Luxol as a very far-sighted and fairly Machiavellian entity; she qualified for this world’s standard of ‘benevolent’, but anything with her fingerprints on it was cause for some amount of caution.
The flavour text described Aleem’s affinity as a limb that had not seen use in a very long while. In the game, it’d been heavily implied that levels and values in Skills and stats could be lost through long periods of disuse, though he’d never experienced such a thing in any of the player characters. Aleem wasn’t sure whether this system of deterioration and atrophy could be applied to affinities, but he supposed that whatever the case, the Geas might have had more of a preservative effect on it.
Non-divulgation Restrictions have been Lifted
The imposed confidentiality concerning the nature of your Geas has been revoked. You may freely share the details of your affinity as well as inquire into the extent and limitations of your compulsion.
Aleem frowned. This seemed to offer a measure of respite, but something about the phrasing was bugging him, though he couldn’t say what. It appeared that this Geas had actually been designed to truly protect Gwa.yao.rai, but Aleem held off on making any hasty judgements. He would have to inquire about this when next he met with Feriona. Or if he ever did.
Feriona had mentioned that the Order of Vrior-Proven had made slight adjustments to Aleem’s Geas; not so much altering it, as building upon it. He wasn’t surprised by this kind of scummy opportunism from them. Even in the game, they had treated jrjis like tools. The nature of their adjustment here was a bit odd, though.
Tailpieces, or piggyback geasa, were familiar concepts in ‘Tales of Woe’. Quite often, the recipient of a powerful Geas would, in a bid to develop themselves in some other way, attach an appendage to the existing divine matrices imprinted upon them. Tailpieces were overly complex to accomplish, and could be rather detrimental if done improperly. Krada Moss, one of the player characters in the game, had been exceptionally adept at Tailpiecing, due to the fact that she was an Outworlder whose home planet had been a seedbed of symbolry. Her play-through had focused quite heavily on both that and semiosis, and it had been Aleem’s favourite aspect of the game’s magic system.
If the primary Geas modules had been revoked, whatever subordinate or hypotactic constructions appended to them would be disarticulated. Which meant that the tailpiece placed by the Vrior-Proven had very likely come undone. It was one less thing to worry about.
He moved on to the final item on the list.
Geas-Modelled Soul Shroud has been Retained
The nature of your soul is hidden from all but the most worthy of observers. Your affinity and histories are concealed.
Aleem read through the text with heightened suspicion. Geasa stood out to the spiritual senses, all the more so when they were divine. A soul shroud of this sort would make them all but invisible to passive scans.
Why anyone would want to conceal the unformed Sithen of a newborn child was beyond him. What histories could an infant have that needed obscuring? It was a disturbing question that raised new ones about his presence in this world. Did the Tutelar goddess, Luxol, know about his transmigration? And if so, did any other gods? Were any of them responsible for the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of his being transported here?
Aleem sighed and shoved the questions aside. Now was not the time to contemplate existential dread. He promised himself that if he made it past the next few days, he would devote quality time to finding answers.
It was clear now why Luctari hadn’t noticed his Geas earlier, and considering the fact that R’shai hadn’t even picked up on the subordinate Tailpiece geas, the shrouding effect probably extended to it as well.
A soul shroud had its advantages. With his affinity hidden, he could keep from standing out too much. Brandishing a non-racial affinity at such a young age was begging to be abducted and experimented upon.
The Barveyan man beneath Aleem’s bench groaned, stirring from sleep. Aleem dismissed the window.
In a foreign tongue, the man muttered something with the sharpness of a grumpy cusser, and then he said.“Mastoishi! The back is frozen stark! Ah.”
“Stiff,” Bebson corrected quietly without shifting an inch from his rigidly erect posture.
The Barveyan man made a noncommittal sound in response and slid out the top half of his body from beneath the bench.
Aleem’s brows rose; he was seated in a lotus position atop the bench and had full view of the man’s face, the edge of which bore a black tattoo. It was a vertical line—half a finger thick—that barely touched the corner of his eye, and ran from the border of his forehead, down past his neck. Several circular notches were equidistantly spaced along the line.
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The Seal of Thamior.
This was the second time Aleem had seen it since his arrival on Orig. The first time, he’d seen it on the face of an Olomti woman in the carriage that’d taken him to the brevet. He’d all but forgotten about that.
Thamior, while a tutelar god, was not a member of Orig’s pantheon. He was one of very few roaming divine entities that influenced the world. His followers were called Thamiorites, and the game had portrayed them as a mystical cult of death-obsessed warriors and explorers. Their patron Tutelar embodied the concepts of personal imperilment and unprompted adventure. Thamiorites were not a terribly bad lot, but they often spelled trouble. What he didn’t understand was why Wulry’s team had hired one.
“Something on face?” the bearded man asked with a thick accent, scrunching up his eyebrows at Aleem who’d been staring.
“The tattoo on your—” Aleem began, then glanced over at R’shai and Bebson before returning his attention to the man. “On your face. You’re—”
“Is tribal mark,” the Barveyan man cut in. He withdrew a canister from underneath the bench and began to unstop it.
Aleem narrowed his eyes. That sounded close enough to what the first Thamiorite he’d met had said. She’d called the crest on her face a tribal marking, which was perhaps a creative slanting of the truth, at best. In the game, there hadn’t been any Barveyan tribes devoted to Thamiorite practices. Not that he knew of, anyway. In terms of the lowest tier of Orig’s pantheon, Thamior was rather young and hadn’t been around for nearly long enough; still, it never hurt to verify.
“What tribe is that then?” Aleem asked, voice laden with suspicion.
The man sloshed the contents of his canister into his mouth, spilling some on his face and beard. Its smell was strong and terribly reminiscent of fermented palm sap. Aleem’s first flatmate in college had owned kegs of palm wine; a scent not so easily forgotten. “One of many,” the man dissembled as he wiped his face with a cream-coloured sleeve.
“What is the boy talking about, Clund?” a statuesque Bebson asked, his frown deepening.
“He’s a Thamiorite,” Aleem said, not even giving their Barveyan driver a chance to explain himself. “You didn’t know?”
“This why hate children,” Clund muttered, shooting a glare at Aleem. He took a more measured swig from his canister this time, wincing slightly as he swallowed.
“They’re a cult,” Aleem spoke on. “They worship the non-Tutelar god, Thamior.”
Bebson opened his eyes, repeating the name as his frown grew even deeper. “I don’t believe I’ve heard that one before.”
“Well, it shouldn’t matter either way,” R’shai said, attention still trained on her book. “Clund doesn’t intend to sabotage our mission in any way. I’ve checked him thoroughly for phrenes and ulterior motives.”
Bebson turned to her. “You knew about his ties to this cult?”
“Beb, I work with Speckled Eye.” She spoke now with that dry disinterest she’d displayed when Aleem had first seen her at the stockade, and nothing of the frenzied dismay from last night could be gleaned in her tone.
“They’re a bunch of hazard-lovers if you ask me,” Aleem said. “But they’re mostly harmless. Rain in the sea and all that.”
“Yes, as bhurou boy say, ‘harmless’,” Clund agreed, from his incredibly awkward position underneath Aleem’s bench. “Thamiorites is secret group. Peaceful people,” he hurried to add, gesticulating with wide hand movements. His forearms were hairy and almost as comically bulky as Popeye’s. “Just want travels and have great experience. Is not important, so I don’t tell you. Also, you never ask.”
Bebson let out a small exasperated sigh and closed his eyes once more, regaining his rigid posture.
“Why him, though?” Aleem asked R’shai. Thamiorites had a nose for trouble, and he just couldn’t write this off as mere coincidence.
R’shai turned a page of her book. “Where else would we have found anyone crazy enough to drive us three days across the grasslands during an uncertain military campaign, and on such short notice?”
That … made sense.
Clund wiggled back underneath Aleem’s bench. “Need little more hours of sleeping,” the Barveyan announced.
Aleem was left to his devices once more, and his mind wandered to his greatest source of psychological stress; the emanation ritual circle in Salgad.
The loose outlines of a plan had been forming at the back of his mind for some time now. He suppressed the irrational urge to stand up and begin pacing about in the wagon. Oddly enough, he didn’t feel like making a list. Aleem couldn’t remember the last time in as many as ten years that he’d been uninterested in making one. Perhaps this was a testament to how distraught he currently was.
Knowledge was Aleem’s greatest advantage in this world, yet so little of all what he knew had any practical combat applications. He could not bring any true might to bear in this current conflict, and that very thing troubled him to no end. But he wasn’t without meaningful options.
Hidlosi, a non-player character in ‘Tales of Woe’, had been a member of Sheilu Fir-lilla’s party. She was an affliction specialist with a very high level of expertise in phrenic hazards and anti-memetic effects. She’d helped uncover the extent of Daibon’s reprehensible actions. The cult carried out all sorts of atrocious experimentation into how best to pervert the mind and Sithen. Not even their members were excluded from being test subjects. The leadership kept a tight reign on all their subordinates through a system of extensive grooming and conditioning. Due to the nature of the Sithen, one could only practice mind control on those with whom they had shared a significant amount of intimate trust and vulnerability. Thus Daibon recruited their members from a very early age, children were, after all, very susceptible to being brainwashed. This was the secret behind the cult’s exceptional coordination and effectiveness, but it was also their greatest weakness, hence the information had been very tightly contained.
Orotaz, for one, had been heavily programmed and trained for this ritual all his life. In the game, Hidlosi had eventually bypassed Orotaz’s defences and taken remote control of the man. He’d been a third Elevation [Warlock] then, but at this point in the timeline, Orotaz would merely be at the peak of second Elevation, which was undoubtedly more powerful than anyone on Wulry’s party. This was a conversation Aleem decided he would need to have with all of them, once Clund replaced Wulry and Serend out front.
Aleem sighed softly and reached for his cloth-bag, taking out the book he’d gotten from Wulry. If anything, it was a booklet. ‘Fundamentals of Mana Control and Desire Moulding for Children’. He strained under the vehicle’s dim light, and continued reading.
Desire moulding involved shaping the intent around a predetermined structure, which would better allow mana to exact a specific effect. A decent portion of that boiled down to visualisation, which apparently emphasised the need for high enough values in Cognition.
The first exercise the book provided had to do with visualisation and how best to focus when meditating. Aleem skipped past it, but the following exercises concerned preparations for extensive visualisation. Skimming through, he saw nothing that would be of use to him. He flipped over to the back end of the book, where he found three intricate exercises, that directly pertained to both desire-moulding and mana-manipulation. He picked one at random. It gave him instructions on how to envisage a small network of basic illusory matrices, upon which he could shape his intent.
It was a three-dimensional grid with curved lines. The idea was to retain the matrices in his mind, and then carefully pattern his own desire after it. The book refrained from mentioning what the results would entail, he found that annoying.
It was complex enough that he wondered about the book’s title. ‘For Children’, it said. This was a little hardcore. The book literally had sections where it taught Visualisation from scratch, only to follow that up with mental acrobatics. He knew that many noble families in Orig subjected their scions to experimental forays in the hopes of further empowering their line, so it really shouldn’t have surprised him all that much. There was a reason mage-types almost always had significant financial backing. The quality of education needed to actually snag such a Class early on was nothing to be sneezed at.
Activating [Trance], Aleem closed his eyes and retreated inwards, letting the exercise consume his entire focus. The visualisation fell apart the first few times, but he continued working very slowly, undaunted. His mana coursed through him in time with the deliberate effort he expended on the exercise.
After an indeterminable amount of time, Aleem was distracted by something strangely familiar. There was a faint beckoning coming from far beneath him. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with the desire-moulding exercise, but he detected a hint of urgency. Reluctantly, he abandoned the visualisation and opened his eyes to find that night had well and truly descended on the wagon.
His eyes adjusted very quickly to the dark. Something refractory and persisting pulled at his attention, he looked down, and the impression seemed to be coming from … beyond the floorboards. Aleem narrowed his eyes. The first time he’d felt something like this had been back at the kwesh stockade. He’d come across a very dark portion of the hallway that seemed to call to him. He’d completely forgotten about it.
It was an inexplicable awareness, and even now, he felt it from a few other places. Beneath his bench and off to the side, beyond the walls of the wagon. There were tiny pockets of … something all about, but the greatest concentration of it seemed to be under the floorboards.
Could this be related to his shadow affinity? The player character, Onri Penchepa, despite having the [Shadow Maiden] Class, hadn’t possessed a shadow affinity until much later in the game, but her play-through had provided far more insight into the shadow affinity than Akniyano, the incarnation, had.
Aleem closed his eyes and followed the subtle impressions. Riding on a hunch, he held his breath. [Trance] was still active. With each throb of his own pulse, he explored the faint beckoning, and like clockwork, it grew less and less faint.
It was the weirdest sensation ever. A non-viscous inkiness that only barely clung to his perception, and he’d hardly completed the thought when he realised that he could, in fact, interact with it extra-sensorily. There was a mutual pulsing, a sort of resonance between him and the objects of his focus.
ALERT
The Skill [Mana Sense] has levelled up!
[Mana Sense] level 5 (<- - -3)
+1 to Cognition
With his senses briefly heightened, Aleem understood at that moment what it was that he’d been perceiving. Not merely shadow, but something recognised by mana. Something markedly elemental. Somehow, Aleem could tell that it was minuscule in its manifest entirety.
In ‘Tales of Woe’, one way that hopefuls strove for affinities was by carefully attuning themselves to whatever vaunted elements they sought; searching for tiny deposits or manifestations of it, and steadily gaining compatibility. This took decades of work in some cases, and centuries in others. Unless, of course, you were fortunate enough to have it simply passed down to you by way of a bloodline or some other anomalous determinant.
He traced the pocket of elemental shadow coming from beneath his bench to Clund, the Barveyan driver. The Seal of Thamior was not a geas, but it was imparted in a similar manner. Something conceptual was infused into a bodily marking, and markings such as these always had more than a hint of elemental shadow in them.
The other source, Aleem surmised, would have to be the Grommet, Wulry’s Spirit Tool. It was a bonded artefact, which had actually been crafted by the Tutelar god, Mhetep, centuries before his ascension. Elemental shadow was sure to be found wherever space was being frequently manipulated.
The final and more pronounced source was a lot harder to understand. Beyond the floorboards could easily mean the underside of the wagon, but Aleem was getting the distinct impression that this viscous sensation did not merely originate from their vehicle at all.
He checked to see that he was still guiding his mana, then he brought the entire weight of his focus down on the floorboards. [Mana Sense] had first levelled up when the Vriorian giantess had done something. He still wasn’t sure what exactly that had been, but it’d confirmed to Aleem that the Skill didn’t merely focus on internal mana. He had yet to intentionally apply the Skill to anything external, so he tried doing so now. He reached out nonphysically, as though to appreciate the ‘feel’ of mana coming from beyond the floorboards. It was like making your ear twitch or trying to move a muscle you'd never intentionally moved. After some moments of groping in the literal dark, he got a new impression.
If the mana within him had felt like potential, the concentration of elemental power beneath him felt to his senses like potentiality. It accentuated its capacity to represent any number of things, while evidently avoiding any disclosure of what it actually was. It shied away from definition, and [Trance] thrummed with delight. [Mana Sense] strained with effort.
ALERT
The Skill [Trance] has levelled up!
[Trance] level 11
The Skill [Mana Sense] has levelled up!
[Mana Sense] level 6
+1 to Cognition
He let out a sharp breath, opening his eyes wide. Fragmentary packets of pure intuition flickered in and out of his consciousness. Aleem had always considered himself well-adapted to his own emotions, so he easily picked up on them as they bloomed and vanished in a wink. A truly alien experience for him. His mind was subjected to an erratic gamut of unpleasant passions. Apprehension, terror, uncertainty, ambivalence, breath-constricting dread, uneasiness, terror, and then …
DOOM.
In all his 23 years of life, Aleem had never once undergone anything that he would sincerely call a premonition. Not until now, at least. He knew instantly what the sensation entailed. Aleem hadn’t exactly been paying rapt attention at that time, but Feriona’s words from earlier in the day came back to him in full force.
“Even if you didn’t have dark portents swirling over your head right now…”
‘Dark potents’. A momentous event was underway. He was hyperventilating, he realised. He got his breathing under control, mind racing.
It wasn’t the wagon. Or at least, it wasn’t just the wagon. The elemental residue was originating from all of them. Him, Wulry, R’shai, all of them. They were touching, even if only barely, upon the instrument of eventuality. Causal mechanisms in a system, which ‘Tales of Woe’ often referred to as machinations. They were pieces on a game board, cogs in a wheel.
He hurriedly deactivated [Trance].
The already slow wagon began to slow down even more, pulling Aleem out of his thoughts. The vehicle came to a stop and someone pounded the wall behind Bebson and R’shai. “Need to let the horses rest some,” Wulry called from outside.
Clund, the driver, was the first one out of the wagon. The wiry man had all but rolled out from underneath Aleem’s bench and left the door ajar, trailing that tangy scent of palm wine in his wake. R’shai headed out next, and Aleem followed behind her.
Nebulae and sparkling stars lined the heavens. Soros, the pink gibbous moon, hung heavily in the sky, hardly concealed by sparse clouds. It was very large. In the game, Representatives of the then-former Vriorian Tutelar goddess had descended a few times onto the planet proper. It had always seemed so epic in-game. Aleem wondered what it might be like watching it with his own eyes.
The night air was cool and smelled like dust and crushed herbs. Even with the light show overhead, it was still fairly dark. The patchy grasslands stretched out before him in every direction, dotted with woody plants and the very rare tree-like structure.
Serend stepped off the box seat on the lip of the wagon’s anterior wall. The dark-skinned girl had a large hat on, and her smile was bright as ever, slick cane in one hand. Her shlöck was nowhere to be seen, though.
“How’d you find the breeze?” R’shai asked good-naturedly as she approached her companion.
“Oh, it helped a little with the clamminess,” Serend said, “but I really enjoyed holding the reins!”
“Holding the what?” Bebson asked, stepping off the wagon, unhidden misgiving in the pitch of his voice. “Please tell me you’re joking. Wulry couldn’t possibly have let you drive.”
Aleem chuckled to himself. He took a few steps away from the vehicle and began executing some stretches. What he needed right now was to soak in a hot bath. His stomach grumbled. And maybe some food, too.
The horses had some seriously prominent musculature and were very large. Aleem’s head didn’t even come up to the rumps of the bulky pair. Their coats had been dyed a bright green and orange, the oddness of which he doubted he’d be getting over soon. Clund and Wulry worked at unhitching the beasts, after which Wulry, as per his agreement with the Barveyan, provided some baled fodder and two pails of water. It was so bizarre watching the man pull the most ridiculous things out of thin air. Back in Aleem’s old life, some fans of ‘Tales of Woe’ had often joked that Wulry’s Spirit tool was inspired by Toodles from the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.
About an hour later, Aleem and two others sat once more around a heating disc that stained the world a dull red and pushed out warm air into the cold night. Bebson had gone over their route with Clund, much of it was terrain talk, which Aleem didn’t care much for.
It turned out that Clund had the [Teamster] Class, which made him perfectly suited for his role as driver. He claimed that he could boost his horses’ endurance, and that fact was fairly evident. With almost no supervision from him, the beasts had travelled for most of the day and had even stayed on course while Serend held the reins, which she quite certainly had done.
The Deyegint stretch, by carriage, was four days of travel away, but Clund insisted that he could get them there in under three without having to overwork his horses. Aleem honestly found that impressive.
He nursed now between his palms the dregs of a no-longer-steaming cup of Faw wine. A cat-sized keg of the stuff sat by the heating disc; the taste was starting to grow on Aleem, and it really helped with hydration. At his feet sat an empty bowl, which had contained a roll of sourdough bread and strips of peppered mystery jerky. He’d wolfed them down in bare minutes, but hadn’t sought seconds. Aleem felt rather certain that his stress levels had inflicted constipation on him, but there was no need to push the envelope.
A groggy Hetti had briefly come out to drink some Faw wine. She’d seemed far less mouthy than usual, and after a quiet exchange with Serend, she’d retired to the wagon. Clund had needed to squeeze out every last minute of sleep he could get away with, so he had returned to his perch beneath Aleem’s bench.
“We can handle Quest business when Clund is driving,” Wulry had said. “It’s been a long day, lad. Eat. Rest up. We have the entirety of this ... fate-fraught trip to discuss tactics. Understand?”
Aleem had suppressed his misgivings and taken the man’s words in good faith, but a part of him still felt like they weren’t treating any of this seriously enough.
Wulry and R’shai had moved over to the box seats, even though the horses had been unhitched. There, they sat in what had to have been companionable silence.
Serend had her instrument out once more and was only lightly stroking the strings; she rendered a low, calming sequence sprinkled with unintuitive pauses. It set a jarringly idyllic ambience that made Aleem keenly aware of just how tired he was.
It was a contradiction.
Ever since he’d gazed, without eyes, into that dense pocket of elemental shadow beneath the wagon’s floorboards, his mana had grown turbulent. There was an unshakeable feeling of deep-dyed restlessness in him.
Aleem excused himself and retired to the wagon. Hetti’s snores were great and mighty but, strangely enough, he found them comforting. He wasn’t sure why, and he didn’t care to investigate his emotions right that moment.
He called to mind the desire-moulding exercise he’d terminated mid-practice, and was disappointed to learn that he would need to reconstruct the matrices. He cast the ‘Self Lantern’ cantrip and used his glowing fingers to reacquaint himself with the illusory template. He activated [Trance].
Carefully, he constructed the network in his mind’s eye, letting his mana course through his ducts effortfully. Aleem had always felt at home when tackling slow and deliberate work, and this particular exercise had been designed to take days. As was his wont, he lost himself to the practice.
Just bare moments before he segued into meditative sleep, Aleem successfully completed the illusory matrices.