Teuila knows that I need to continue practicing runes, so I have to locomote myself carefully, smoothly. If it weren’t for that, I’d just have her haul me around, covering far more ground than we’re going to be covering. As is, I sense the minor tremors as the ground quakes far in the distance. Teuila has leapt many miles ahead, and is taking out her frustrations, and her sadness, pounding something with all her might. The shockwaves wouldn’t register to anyone who wasn’t hypersensitive to such fluctuations, but I’ve always been able to detect things like that. Something like hypersensitive hearing I suppose, despite it being more like my sense of feeling, and balance, that intercepts and perceives the tremors.
Teuila, My Wings—. I allow the tears to flow freely, as I navigate as swiftly as my telekinesis allows, towards the epicenter of the vibrations. I doubt she’s fighting anything dangerous. It’s more likely she’s taking out her frustrations at having her emotions restrained due to circumstance, and needing to leave someone that she was falling for. Well, many other frustrations as well honestly. There are so very many things weighing on her right now, but I’m honestly surprised that she’s confident I’ll survive in the swamp, and that she didn’t return to deal with the hydra I was inside of. We keep promising each other no more solo activities, and to spend every last moment together, and neither of us is able to keep to that promise. I certainly don’t hold it against her, nor she against me. I half expect her to bring up our promise as soon as I’m within telepathic range.
True to form, after not too long, when I finally enter her range, Teuila’s telepathic avatar appears in my mindscape, tears in her eyes. Te apologizes with a plea, “Air, Air I’m sorry. We keep saying no more solo time, no more time apart. I’m so scared of leaving Tiki, of your days being numbered. I’m so lost, and I’m so scared. Please forgive me for running ahead.”
I rush to embrace her in meatspace as quickly as I can navigate with telekinesis, trying to catch up to her location, while my telepathic avatar envelopes hers in its arms. I don’t know how to make things right, to make us feel okay and safe. The emotions come in waves, literally in Teuila’s case. We’re going to be in a bumpy patch of uncertainty as my deadline looms.
Teuila continues, “If, if I lose you, somewhere, hundreds of miles away from the Aasimovians, while they’re playing hopscotch to get out west, hiding in dugouts and hideyholes, I’ll be truly lost. If I lost you, and couldn’t find my way back to Tiki, or Alanea, or, or someone, I’d lose myself. I can’t take it. I can’t bear to imagine it. Air, my Airhead, my very Air that I breathe, I’ve never been as scared as I have been these last few weeks. Even after Dawn, I was hurt, and broken down, but, but I thought we’d heal, something. We finally find dragons, and they get away. They got away! It’s not fair!”
Teuila’s telepathic avatar begins pounding on my avatar’s chest, as she virtually screams her sobs aloud, her wail of utter despair brings down the illusory walls of my mindscape in its sorrowful dirge. It reveals the absolute devastation beyond, that I’d been hiding. She already knew about it, but it’s just one more reminder of how close I am to death’s door. I work as quickly as I’m able to in paused time to throw the walls back up, to paint over my mindscape, and patch a few cracks, before returning to Teuila’s frustrated cries.
My avatar catches the wrists of Teuila’s avatar gently, and murmurs soft comforts at her, holding her hands against its chest. I try to assure her, “I know Te. I know. We can’t be reckless, but we’ll go all-out, at the next dragon, well, next evil dragon, we find. I’ll master the telekinesis spell, and use it to shield you from their breath attacks, so that you can land fatal blows. We can do this as a team, when we’re prepared, but only if we aren’t reckless. I love you, and I owe you everything, so I’m here for you. I’m here for you, My beloved Wings. I love you. Try to remember that, and to feel it, to center on it. I’m here. I’m still here.”
Teuila’s wails slowly subside to sad sobs in thinkspace as I catch up to her in meatspace. I’m practicing runes all the while. I find Teuila in the center of a crater that’s slowly filling with water. I feel like the crater she created was likely as muddy, wet of soil as everything else beforehand, but other than the drizzel, and the rivulets running down into it from its top, it almost looks more like dry sand than the mud of the rest of the swamp. She must have managed to displace all of the moisture from it with the pressure generated by the force of her attacks. Swooping down, I land so that Teuila’s forced to flump onto the shield with me, ending with her sitting on it, and her legs dangling in the air beneath us.
I ask, “So, did you want to take a break here Te? Oh, crap, did you leave your big backpack behind?”
Teuila shakes her head twice before explaining, “I got a new pack, like yours, it’s under my cloak. Beri said it was the least he could do for his little saviors, said it would take a lifetime to make another one, but it was a lifetime that he owed to you. It’s got more space than yours does. Beri basically gave up everything, and refused to take no for an answer. You saved him Air. You really did that. We try, don’t we? To be good?”
I nod, and Teuila continues, “On a good day, we’re good guys, adventurers, on a really good day, we’re even heroes. But who are we on our worst days? You felt so bad about your wrath, your rage killing beaverfolk cultists, because they were still people, and because you didn’t like the deaths happening out of your control, and, and so much more. I finally get it now, what it feels like, to have someone die at your hands, that you didn’t want to kill. I can barely imagine how you coped, and came to terms. I know we spent years in thinkspace, working through things like that, but it never hit me, til now. Air, I don’t know if we have years, I don’t know if we even have weeks, or days. I can’t do this without you. I need my Air because it feels like a squeeze so tight that I can’t breathe. I can’t imagine processing this, without you in thinkspace being there, comforting me, guiding me through the emotions, helping me allow myself to feel.”
I kiss Teuila’s forehead as I begin our telekinetic journey in earnest, having us float along at barely more than walking speed. A few miles per hours is all I can muster, but it’s more progress than I’d make on such uneven terrain, with so many pitfalls, and such deep, sticky mud. I need the travel to be smooth, to keep working on runes, because we need our powers and abilities to be top-notch to take on dragons. I got lucky with Kozzurth being lazy, overconfident, and overweight. She was bloated on the flesh of the ancestors, and barely thought of anything as anything more than food. She made mistakes that were easy to capitalize on, but our fights from here on out are going to be against beasts who might have many, many decades, or even centuries of wisdom and intelligence to rely on.
I comfort Teuila as best I can in response to her lament, “You won’t have to process it all alone, one way or another. We’ll reunite with Lil and Lu soon. I think about a little over two weeks at this pace. We’ll arrive at their approximate location in the bright of September, shortly before the solstice. With any luck, we’ll turn the tide of whatever apocalypse the dragons would have been bringing, and maybe that’ll bring about my cure. Maybe.”
Trying to sway the tide of emotions, I add, “I’ve got good news on that front at least. If I do manage to find my cure, because of the destruction in my nerves, I can filter out mana, and keep it from building up excess residue. I’ve been practicing with a mental subroutine, and it seems like it’s working fine. I can’t do anything about what’s already there, but I’ve got a suspicion that when I have enough dragonforce, the residue is going to break apart, or snap, and need to leave my body forcefully.”
A tiny spark of hope finds itself in Teuila’s eyes as she sniffles before asking, “Really Air? That’s great news. I’m so proud of you. You can turn anything into a plan. It’s why I trust that you’ll always be okay, even if I’m not right there, where I should be, at your side. You know how I feel right? Not, glp, not just the words I can’t say, but also that I admire how your brain works, despite all the wonky silly things that sometimes go through your head. You know that, right? I’m always proud of you, and, and, and everything. I can find some little comforts, or bunches of fun, with others, but you’re everything to me. Your heart, and mind have been, just, just so important since the Night of High Water. No, since the moment you skidded facefirst on the beach. I saw that darkness, that pain of the trauma, but how brilliantly your mind shined through it.”
I barely prevent myself from crying at Teuila’s heartfelt admission. I know how hard it is for her to bring herself to say such words, even if they aren’t the ones that are specifically hardest for her to say. Hours pass, as I continue to rely on charges from the archsorc staff to renew the telekinesis every so often, having to take short walking breaks, or sitting breaks, to hide out and gather enough ambient mana to have the telekinesis last for more than just a few minutes. It’s rather exhausting, relying on the staff in this manner, and it leaves us vulnerable, and eliminates one of my most powerful and versatile tools from my repertoire of answers that might be needed to situations that may arise.
Te offers, “I’m sorry, by the way.”
I raise my eyebrow, and Teuila elucidates, “After the Night of High Water, when it looked like you were dead. That’s the first time I saw someone who didn’t derez, that looked like they were dead, gone. Your eyes were clouded over, and kinda glassy. You were burned to a crisp. You tried to save Lu, who was derezzing. My precious little Lu, and—. Sniffle. It looked like she was just gone, and you stopped moving, and then Lil disappeared too. I lost my mind. I went crazy. It was like all of reality broke, and didn’t make sense. It wasn’t right. I was so angry, and hurt. I blamed you for dying. I slapped you, and, and I, glp. I was going to probably go for your eyes, because of how haunting it was to see them so dead. To see them without that spark of you in them.”
I gulp back sticky mucus and fight a sniffle as I nod, “I remember, I saw you slapping me. It was one of the times I had an out of body experience, and was able to view things while I was incapacitated. I’m sorry I put you through that. I’m--, I don’t know what to say.”
Te shakes her head, “You don’t get to be sorry. You saved us, those of us that are left, even my precious Lu. My baby sis. I couldn’t ask for more. I won’t ask for more. Except, don’t die. Please Air, just don’t die. Reggie? Reggie, please. Somehow, somehow make it not true. Make the threat of you dying go away. That night, I begged, I bargained, I bit and slapped, and offered anything to have you not be dead, to have Lu not be dead. Then suddenly you weren’t dead. Then later Lu popped out with Lil, like a freaking miracle. I was out of my mind, the world didn’t make sense, and then suddenly, even though the world was weird and broken and scary, it was okay.”
Teuila quickly adds further explanation, “Because she was okay, and you were going to be okay. I know I said I blamed you, but logically I knew it wasn’t your fault. It’s just, you know what emotions are like for me, and that’s why I’m so scared to let them out. It wasn’t logic that had me slapping what I thought was a corpse, when I’d never even known what a corpse was before that point, not in the way that you seemed to be one anyway.”
I nod as we land to take a break since my Telekinesis is beginning to wear off. Te is fretful, unsure if either of us can afford to spend time sleeping, with what little time I have left, and with the dangers that lurk in the swamp, but at the very least we have to take naps, bare minimum, if not get full nights sleeps in. Right now, we’re going to have to rest for about eight hours before the staff has enough magic in it to work again anyway, and I’m already past my daily safe S P limit of runes due to practicing. I’m only a couple days away from mastering the telekinesis self enchantment, then I’ll place it on myself and enhance it with the permanency enchantment.