The feather took Ewan away from the Stormfalcon, deep towards the bed again. He avoided the marked territories of the Astylinds of his or higher level the best he could, dimming his presence with the Yurn, and propelled forward with Kidd in tow, both wrapped in their own defense bubbles. When they edged on the maximum range of the remote-bracelet, Stefan had Nyte follow them at the lowest thrust. And after a couple of pings between the two, the feather pointed straight down, boiling the water around it with its heat.
Life and activity marked the area, fauna thrived here, and the Astylinds mingled about. No one had dominated this region yet, and even the weak Astylinds roamed the waters, so the threat to the two remained at its lowest. Yet there was no ‘treasure’ before them. Beyond the pitch black, only a bed of sand scarred with trenches and corals greeted them.
“There’s nothing here, Boss,” Kidd passed his voice to Ewan, shooing away the playful fishes. They blew bubbles at him when he poked them and scampered away, the slowest of the school struggling to catch up.
“This place somehow feels familiar…,” Ewan muttered, looking around the place. The history of the Eyeless Tribe and the existence of the feather combined with his own hunch gave him an idea about what their destination was. Probabilities and coincidences played their games, and Ewan, confined within their grasps, went around a full circle. He failed to get the egg, the opportunity that ‘luck’ gave him, yet a lucky encounter with the feather led him to it anyway.
“Is it pointing at the egg we were looking for?” Kidd confirmed with his question.
“Most likely,” Ewan said, and narrowed his search to the region where the feather stood erect and burned the hottest. And after digging inches of sand, muddling the waters around, the strange but familiar egg said a silent hello from the center of the circular rock formation. The ups and downs Ewan expected never came, no sudden events became an accident, and he cradled the onyx egg after the feather dissolved the defensive shield around it—a head-sized crystal ball accompanied it, so Ewan pocketed that too.
The place had nothing else of interest to him, he confirmed it after digging a hole that nigh matched the trenches around, even the defensive rock formation lost its luster after it fulfilled its duty. And thus, with his prize in his hand and a smile on his face, he returned to the Stormfalcon with Kidd, pressurizing him with his Ryvia and easing him up to the surface’s conditions.
….
The feather bulldozed towards the egg when they both hovered with the crystal ball on the top deck, but Ewan kept it at bay. Before he checked everything and confirmed their authenticity, he couldn’t let any uncontrolled incident occur.
The rather clean egg showed no fluctuations of life, it’d gone beyond the suspended state. If time caused it and it wasn’t deliberate, it couldn’t be Ewan’s fifth Astylind for he couldn’t bring it back to life. The hotter-than-ever feather’s actions, though, led his thoughts towards planned calculations. As for the crystal ball, it most likely contained information. And so, Ewan drilled his Ryvia in and touched its core.
Strings of Kaaleria letters climbed up his Ryvia from the crystal ball, seeping inside his soul space when he let it, and gathered in his mind to form coherent words. The text introduced the life of the Eyeless Tribe, or the Taredith Tribe as they called themselves—their traditions, their rites, their harmony with their crows, and their struggles. The emotional and the subjective bias in it painted the tribe as a peace-loving archaic civilization. They were the innocent victims of the external world, mainly the immoral pirates who took the serenity out of their daily lives. It screamed injustice, cried about the unfairness of the world, and furthered a positive but also a victim’s image of the tribe, which all boiled down to a seed of thought in the end, attached to the inheritance.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The ask was for the thorough annihilation of piracy on the waters, not just the Swordfish Pirates. And the reward was a condescending acceptance to the tribe with the complete legacy of the Whispered path, and a contract with the ‘crow’.
Ewan combed through the information, deleted the useless bits, stitched the important segments, and finally crushed the seed of thought before it could take root—it was an application of the mystic element, and he reigned over it with his current affinity.
For the crow, if the feather could revive the egg and if its details satisfied him, he would contract it as his fifth Astylind. But for the Whispered path…
It was a path of the soul and had a drastic requirement for the initiation which demanded utter commitment. Under different circumstances, Ewan would throw it in a corner of his claw-ring only to ever use it as a reference. However, he had someone with him now who was desperate to tread past the limit of his life and step over to their side.
Ewan looked at Stefan. “This has the inheritance of the Whispered path, you’re probably qualified for it,” he said. “Do you want it?”
Stefan parted his lips and his eyes widened. “C-Can I?” he stuttered.
“Its initiation process is not easy though,” Ewan said. “The eyeless part of the tribe’s name was literal; you need to dig your eyes out if you want to become a Whispered.”
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Status: Healthy
Step-1 Severynth [Spirit-Nebula: Zeroth Surge]
Subtype: Step-0 Elementalist
Name: Ewan Ayres
Species: Human
Vitality: 7.0
Spirit: 25.5
Anima: [Fire – 25.5 | Ice – 25.5 | Blood – 25.5 | Mystic: 25.5]
Astylinds: 4 [Potential: 1]
Rolling Cat [Toast]: Step-1 Severynth [Spirit-Nebula: Zeroth Surge]
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Fire Monkey [Orange]: Step-1 [Level-10] [Grade-B]
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Imp [Frost]: Step-1 [Level-10] [Grade-B]
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Bloodthorn-Lotus [Iris]: Step-1 [Level-10] [Grade-D]
Equipment: Common Clothes; Yurn [Neck Gaiter]; Moonkeeper [Crystal-Ball]; Rainwarden [Staff]; Blackfeather [Overcoat].
Storage: Journal; Elementalist—The Path of Anima [Subtype-Book]; Spellbook; Bloodlust [Spell]; Transmute [Spell]; Unknown Book [Radon’s Legacy]; Anima-Crystals [Novas Coins]; Hub-Connector; Ingredients.
Novas: 19,154
Crelith: 801