Breathe in. She thought about the strangers and it nearly disrupted her carefully controlled form, threatening to trip her or cause her breathing to accelerate, disrupting the rhythm of her enhancement spell. Man. Four of them. Dressed in layers of grass tied on in the most rudimentary way, though with some minute suggestion of familiarity with the concept of braiding and weaving. Afraid of the beavers, of all things. As if they were particularly aggressive beasts. Admittedly though, these Man likely were truly in danger from even the more minor of beasts.
They couldn’t even light a fire properly. They were starving to death. They’d eaten a fish raw, given the smell and lack of a fire. Their desperate hunger for the greasy travel biscuits and the elk jerky… Plus the one was fat. The only one which could speak any of the known languages for Summons of Man.
Summons. Flawed ones. There was the taint of Essence on them, yes, but they had no Archives. Their Cores were bare, exposed, drawing in no Mana and producing none in return. Anathema to all that Elean knew about life in the world. All life produced Mana. All life drew in Mana. All sapient life formed Archives, even if they never learned to scribe spell structures in them. They had Cores, they were sapient, but they were broken, incomplete. Flawed Summons.
Breathe out. She shuddered. This was monumental news. The last Summons of Man that she had heard of had perished of old age in the Kingdom of Man, when she was an annoying brat of a child. Tales of Summons of other species had reached the Sentinels from outsiders wandering in, intentionally or unintentionally, to the prairie, but none of Man. None so flawed. Summons were blessed by Essence, imbued with divine abilities, given incredible strength and potential. Spell structures scribed into their Archives in Essence rather than Mana, granted them incredible potency beyond anything a mortal could bring to bear.
They were flawed! What did this mean? Should they aid them? Should they destroy them? They begged her for assistance! They wanted to go to the Talor! If she reached out to one of the few contacts they had with the inner Talor, the response would be swift. They would be ordered to destroy them immediately, before these Summons could become powerful. Perhaps the god which performed the Summoning had made a mistake? Was such a thing possible? Perhaps they were hiding their strength.
At first, she’d been terrified, though she hid it. The fat Man had been amusing however. Awkward and yet disarming in some way. He’d been fascinated by simple spells. He’d wanted to touch her ears.
She stumbled, tucking into a rolling slide and coming to a stop a long way away, lying on her back and staring into the empty blue sky. Her breathing came in shuddering gasps. She had no drive for physical intimacy and to touch someone’s ears was incredibly intimate indeed. Many would prefer to have sex with someone than allow their ears to be touched. True, they exposed them blatantly but the sensitivity of the nerves…
It didn’t stir anything in her and for some reason, that made her deeply sad. The Man had offered to let her touch his own ears and she’d been repulsed by her own curiosity. They were not under Compulsion. She’d heard that some of the female Sentinels had voluntarily engaged in sex with male interlopers, who were able to garner a functional response from their anatomy, being free of anything like the Compulsion. She’d asked about it once when she was younger and new to being a Sentinel. The response had been… lackluster. They said it was no different an experience than simply touching another, beyond the novelty.
The Compulsion deadened the nerves, not merely the desire. Why was she so curious though? Maybe it was because for the first time, these were beings who not only did not mean to trespass, but they literally did not understand what the trespass represented. They had no tales about how those who entered the prairie never returned. Even the beasts knew this, those who were not adapted to be residents. Any beast which might even possibly be violent, they were Compelled to destroy. Few remained that were not simply prey animals. Those the Sentinels controlled for population and hunted for a supply of meat to be traded with the inner Talor in exchange for goods such as fabric, clothing, tools. Things they could not feasibly produce themselves.
Gradually Elean got control of her breathing, shifting the complicated enhancement down to its lowest effect, allowing her to get started again. Not much further now. She decided to completely deactivate the enhancement and make the remaining few kilometers at a normal pace. It gave her time to consider the path forward. Was she grasping at stalks here? Would the god that Summoned them realize there had been an issue and come to correct it? Could they form Archives on their own? Everything hinged upon the idea that they couldn’t, or if they did, that it wouldn’t occur before she could go through with the attempt.
If this worked, maybe she would let the fat one touch her ears. Maybe she would want him to…
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Ugh, but he was quite fat, by Talor standards at least. Not that some of the lazier nobles and merchants from her memories of the Inner region didn’t contain similar or worse examples, but still, that level of excess and lack of muscle was disgusting. It indicated a lack of investment in oneself that was intolerable to the Talor. Even the most lazy of merchants had substantially more muscle than that Man. She also though recalled the stories of Man, far in the North and West, across many hostile Kingdoms from the Talor lands. The stories often depicted merchants, rulers, even examples of particularly good people as far more obese. Perhaps such was simply the lot for Man.
The other three were a contradiction to that thought though. Not that they were exceptionally fit, but they all clearly maintained a level of strength that was at least acceptable. The one in particular, whom the female amusingly sought to protect, was particularly well muscled. He would have been considered on the smaller end for a male Talor, but not displeasing to see. Elean had always gone in more for the smaller and more effeminate men anyways. Hell, she went in for the women almost as much. It wasn’t unusual for Talor to be almost evenly split on their preferences. The drive to birth children was still strong enough that few did not find a reproductive partner as well.
Alas even if this plan worked, she was likely too old to have any offspring. That. That caused an ache in her core and almost turned her plans to the darker ones she’d been starting to harbor lately. Those plans she would consider again, if this opportunity did not work.
She looked at the well hidden entrance in the side of the hill, seeking the key spell within her Archive. No, not that… ah, yes, she’d filed it amongst the gas relief spell to hide it… the structure flashed into place on the designated Node, only a tier 1 spell. Mana flared through it in a mere trickle, less than her natural rate of replenishment. The boulder, nearly hidden by the mid spring growth, silently sucked into the hill and to the side, nestling into a hidden pocket there and revealing a dark hole she had to crawl into. Triggering the second effect of the spell, the boulder rolled back into place, the Enchantment structure hidden on its backside glowing briefly until it completed the action. Another spell extracted from her Archive produced an ambient light that cast no shadows. It faded out of effect some twenty meters away, but that was already beyond the limit of the small hidden room and was thus barely noticeable unless she was in one corner and looking towards the other.
Once Elean had crawled down the rest of the small tunnel, she was able to just barely stand inside. The floor, walls, and ceiling were all Reinforced soil. The roots of the grasses on the top of the hill were visible along the surface of the ceiling and walls, unable to extend beyond the defined borders. Every single wall was absolutely packed with shelving that just barely fit the scrolls, books, tablets, knick-knacks and devices, weapons, armors, tools, etcetera. The collection of at least one Sentinal’s lifetime. Items retrieved from those who had been eliminated, having entered the Talor lands. Some may have been traded for with the Inner region, but it was technically forbidden to provide the Sentinels with any knowledge that might allow them to break the Compulsion or communicate with outsiders.
Not a single one of these things wasn’t related to that very goal. Idly Elean ran a finger along the small section of writings on ‘Phonetics of Summoned Languages’. It was these very tools that had allowed her to even communicate with the fat one. With… ‘Owl-lan’. It was incredibly frustrating. She’d only ever practiced the languages in hypothetical and this ‘Deutsch’ was by far the one she liked the least. The language was not soft or flowing like the other two. Then again, it was clearly not the preferred language for these Man. They spoke a fourth, undocumented language! That they were familiar with at least the sounds and names of the three known languages of the Summons of Man spoke volumes for the truthfulness of their poorly hidden story.
Summoned, unexpectedly, in their sleep no less. Arriving without equipment, knowledge, power, youth. These four gifts were standard for any Summons. Clothing, armor, weapons that were typically Enchanted with structures of Essence, sometimes even sentient themselves and able to grow, containing their own Archives, able to cast their own spells. Objects weren’t Life however, they could not generate Mana, thus firmly establishing their subservience to their living wielders. Knowledge of languages, of spellcraft, combat skills, survival, politics. The Summons almost universally demonstrated an understanding and capability that equaled or exceeded the masters of Man.
Power, abilities granted by divine Essence that could grow with use and the growth of their wielders. The strongest Summons in the legends had leveled small mountains, killed Elder Dragons in a single blow, grown entire Kingdoms worth of crops overnight… high level Summons were nearly gods unto themselves. Youth, perhaps seemingly the least of the boons, Summons were almost universally returned to the youngest age of Majority. For almost all known history of Man, that was sixteen years. They knew from the Summons that the day cycle of the world was very slightly shorter and there were three-hundred sixty-five days rather than the normal three-hundred sixty in year. It worked out to be a year that was identical within seconds of difference.
Given that most of the animal and plant life closely resembled the ones from the world Summons of Man came from, it was entirely likely the entire world was based on the world of the Summons, or the world of Summons was based on this one. The gods did as the gods will, but it made sense to Elean that they would copy what worked. The Mother who birthed their world had likely done the same. Not that anyone could ask the hypothetical goddess of creation. Frequently the gods that brought the Summons or created the occasional Calamity or Miracle referred to the Mother as their, well, mother. The actual goddess herself however, did not seem to descend to the world herself.