Breathe in. The smell of the sweet grass, growing swiftly despite being weeks since the last cold rain. Spring was a period of wet leading into dry, unpredictable other than that the wet would definitely happen and the dry would definitely follow. With the transition from wet to dry, the thunderstorms came. Fire was a rare but real occurrence, given that even the summers were never wholly dry. It was the natural cleansing of the overgrown, providing a returning to the soil of vital materials for regrowth and the scrubbing of parasites, fungus, and bacterial loads.
The grass roots were deep. If any of the Talor knew how deep, it was beyond the knowledge of this one. They were not a tender of crops and the grasses were not domesticated, though they were definitely a resource. Their Mana and the Mana of their fellow Sentinels laced delicately through the interconnected mycelium that spanned the entirety of the prairie. The competing colonies that traced the ever moist earth, laden with the thicker, woodier roots of the various species of trees and shrubs and under deep cover of leaf litter, fresh and in various states of decay, held back that of the prairie.
The Talor seeded their villages and cities with yet more fungal colonies, pushing out the Prairie in exchange for a domesticated form of forest, providing themselves with the wood and fruit and even structural resources that the thick trunked and cultivated trees only the Talor grew provided. The prairie was pushed out, left to the Sentinels. Sentinels like themselves, the one called Elean. She was quite literally cast from the villages and cities, considered dangerous, lusting too much for the outside world, for adventure, conflict. That was… many years ago. The life of a Sentinels was a harsh one. One with the implication of freedom, freedom to roam, to leave the Talor lands, to encounter other species and ways of thinking and…
Breathe out. It was an illusion. The compulsion placed upon the Sentinels prevented them from leaving the prairie. They were Compelled to watch the prairie, ever vigilant, to protect the inner territories from interlopers and to prevent the dilution of Talor culture or the infiltration of outside ones. One could not be part of the massive fungal web of the Prairie, listen to its whisperings, when one was not literally within its reach. Well, one could depart for very short periods of time, for short distances, once one could reconnect with the complex spellworks of the Prairie quickly enough that the Compulsion did not cause physical pain.
Decades. Decades it took for Elean to achieve the speed necessary to reconnect to the network in time to permit just a few hours of separation. After more than a century as a Sentinel, Elean could do it now in moments and thus spend nearly an entire daylight period away. Any longer and the Compulsion would begin to inflict pain. If one did not return in time, it inflicted real injury, increasing in intensity until the nervous system was reduced to a burnt husk and the mind could only feel pain and nothing else. The autonomic responses were not affected directly and so this state of all encompassing pain could last until dehydration took one’s life. Talor did not pass out from pain as easily as Man was purported to do. Man was simply a fragile species.
Unfortunately for the Sentinels, they could not ever enter or even converse with the inner world of the Talor. They were forced into their Compulsions because they represented different ideas. To discuss their thoughts with an inner Talor would violate the Compulsion to preserve that inner culture.
Prisoners, trapped between their instinctive drive to live, their natural long lives, and the Compulsion that kept them isolated. So Sentinels talked with each other as much as they could, sharing thoughts through the network. Each new member brought news of the status of the inner world. When they encounter a trespasser, they made the effort to understand them before they destroyed them. It was the greatest of luck to encounter an outsider that was of particular interest, it could make a Sentinel a veritable celebrity amongst their collective of guardian prisoners.
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Breathe in. Most Sentinels became deeply private as they reached into the second century of their life. Their numbers waxed and waned only by small measures in that timespan. The birthrate of Talor was naturally suppressed when populations were dense and the Compulsion prevented the Sentinels from engaging in reproductive activities. It completely killed the drive and literally prevented the function. No interest and no capacity was an effective means of preventing Sentinels from producing Compulsion free offspring.
So it was that gender came to mean little beyond the physical differences, to the older Sentinels. Companionship rarely went beyond the physical comfort of touch and even that was rare. Despite their numbers, the Sentinels were spread thin to maintain the security of the Talor lands. It had been weeks since Elean had even been close enough to another Talor to identify them. She conversed through the network but was old enough now that the conversations seemed old, repetitive.
The network had detected a strange presence. Four bipeds. Naked. Damaging the grasses… wearing the grasses? Devoid of Mana. Tainted with foreign Essence, not of any known divine. That didn’t say much, the divine rarely extended their Essence into the Talor lands. They were not accepting of Summons, their culture accepted no outside influences. It would be the act of declaring war against the Talor, by whichever god dared Summon into the Talor lands.
She had rushed to investigate. It might be a group of powerful sorcerers, simply masking their Mana so thoroughly the network could not detect its flavors. Perhaps they were Sentinels who had mastered their Compulsions? She’d contemplated the ability to confuse the network in a similar manner, ‘go dark’ as it were. Her efforts there were unsuccessful though and there was no point, the Compulsion was not actually a part of the network, it was engraved into her Archive.
Breathe out. Legs pumping, Mana flowing through her body. The spell was incredibly complex, third tier. Few Sentinels could cast beyond second tier spell structures. Less than a handful of them perhaps. It wasn’t something she advertised, it would bring too much attention. A third tier caster among the Sentinels was a liability.
The Compulsion was only a third tier spell, if at the upper end of what third tier could accomplish.
Oxygen was stripped far more effectively from the air even as it was soured and expelled from her lungs. It flooded her blood in far too great a concentration and yet her cells were undamaged, showing no signs of stress. Her metabolism processed sugars and proteins and toxins alike at unnatural efficiency. Muscles and bone and connective tissue subtly reinforced, assisted. The overall enhancement spell was her own design, almost a century in the making, consisting of repeated feedback loops and parallel spell structures that employed dozens of tier 1 spells in a massive cohesive array and with incredible efficiency and speed. If someone were to look closely and was blessed with enough skill, they might see millions of tier 1 micro-spells filling almost every part of her body.
Breathe in. Another spell, a low level tier two, parted the grasses as if the grass simply parted itself, further improving her mobility. She was running fast enough the world seemed to blur a little, the grass one big abstract impression of a prairie rather than an array of distinct element. Even at these speeds, it would still take more than an hour to reach her destination, dug into and hidden within a hill like any other. Only her connection to the network would even allow her to find it herself.
Breathe out. Her path shifted slightly and the grouse did not even register her passing, though she stepped within a meter of it. Her passing was no louder than the wind which teased waves upon the prairie. Her Mana was so well controlled even the more sensitive beasts would not register separately from the background energy of the grass. Her face was lowered such that only her green hair, which blended almost flawlessly with the grasses, would be at all visible. She needed no sight to see her path.
She was a fish in her sea, if the tales they heard from outsiders of such vast bodies of water could be believed. The prairie was like a sea unto itself, though landlocked. Some of the rivers which crossed it were massive, though one could still see the other side even at their highest. The one she’d just been near was not particularly large, though the melts would really start in earnest any time now and it would flood its banks. More water for the prairie to absorb and distribute. Nutrients as well. The fungal network was not fast, but it could eventually distribute the nutrients and moisture for hundreds of kilometers, given time.