Quiet reigned on the sands for breaths, the blindfolded men and Ewan, both sides held their words as Algernon’s voice faded into the wind. His politeness was only his front, and his sentence baited Ewan into the trade. Yet, for Nana, he gave in and triggered the deal after his thoughts cleared up.
‘What can I offer you for that information?’ The words of sand formed.
“Knowledge of the outside world,” Algernon said with a smile, his cunning hidden beneath.
The gap in information could make or break a win, Ewan had already tasted it with the Governor when his family’s legacy took him to victory. And here, Algernon held the upper hand and shoved Ewan into passivity. Nevertheless, Ewan too wasn’t without his bullets.
‘That’s very vague.’ The words said. ‘How about information on the Swordfish Pirates and the Alasec island?’
Algernon trembled with a wave of hostility when the sand grains formed the words, and the line of men rumbled again, the agitation was worse than before. Ewan’s offer threw a spark into the tinder, and the blindfolded men went up in flames with their ruffled voices of alarm jumbling together.
“How do we verify it?” Algernon asked once his men quietened at his prompt.
‘You can't.’ The words wrote. ‘That’s the same for me, I can't confirm your information either.’
“Okay.” Algernon agreed within seconds of mulling and sent a tattered book towards the icy room while waiting for Ewan to hold his end of the deal.
Ewan kept all the information written in his logs and diaries, but it was in common tongue. So, he recorded it in Kaaleria again, omitted sensitive information that could affect him and his group, and passed the crystal ball to the old man.
“Let’s talk again later.” Algernon nodded and pocketed the ball, and Ewan pulled his Ryvia back with the book when the trade ended, the words of sand collapsing onto the beach. And the blindfolded men receded back into the forest, their backs soon melding and fading amongst the trees.
The insects hummed again.
….
The book wrote the wonders and the horrors of the water around the island, and it mostly matched what Ewan read about the ‘Animaborn’, or its branch called ‘Seaborn’. The island birthed a natural rune of water when the Taredith tribe had just made it their home. So, when the rune gathered and compressed the water, the phenomenon separated the eyeless men and women from the outside world forever.
The threadbare pages recounted the generations worth of helplessness and the anguish they’d suffered, their tears and blood stained every sentence. Nature helped them survive, and the same crucified them to an eternal solitude. They yearned for the sky, they yearned for the world, but they were allowed none.
Ewan eyed the words and flipped through, getting to the meat of the book that contained the vital piece of information he needed. The tribe didn’t know about the ‘Seaborn’ path or about the natural rune, but from tests and experiments, with numerous lives lost over the ages, they’d confirmed a few fatal details—the impossibility of flight, the pull of the water, and the corrosion from its Anima.
He skimmed the first two—the details matched his owns books—and focused on the third. But Nana woke up with a moan before he could finish one sentence.
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“You’re late,” she said, rubbing her puffed eyes.
“I was right on time, couldn’t have made a better entry,” Ewan said, putting the book aside and using a thread of his Ryvia to go through the words.
“You wheeled in the air and crashed into the sand,” she said, brushing his stubble. “You grew a beard.”
“Would be weird if I didn’t by now,” Ewan said. “You jumped on me without even confirming if it was me, what if it was someone else?”
“Only you have this hideous mug in the whole world, I can recognize it anywhere,” she said, grazing her cheek against his, scraping his stubble.
Ewan scoffed. “I was also expecting to pick up a beauty, all I got was an ugly bitch,” he said, almost finishing the book. “Your hair is a bird’s nest.”
“Live on the sand alone for so long and see what happens to you,” she said, pinching and tracing his long hair that nigh reached his lips. “When was the last time you cut them?”
“I was busy looking for you, your dumb map led me nowhere,” he said, stowing the book away in his claw-ring, heaving a heavy and silent sigh in his heart.
The corrosion of the Anima from a natural rune was the spark that ignited the ‘Animaborn’ path. The Anima would invade and mutate any apt person in the vicinity—anyone with a suitable affinity with the element—and the complete transference of the rune would be the birth of an Asheva, an ‘Animaborn’. For this island, the sands were the reach of the Anima, and since the confirmation, the Taredith tribe had not stepped one foot beyond the forest.
Their path of the ‘Whispered’ depended on the harmonious rhythm and the balanced ‘sound’ of all Anima in nature, and the extreme approach of the ‘Animaborn’ conflicted with their core concept—any Whispered who contacted the abundance of invasive Water-Anima had gone mad and killed himself.
Nana had lived on the beach too though, and she had the Recipient-level of affinity with the water element because of her rune….
“Let me check your soul space,” Ewan said and touched her forehead with his, and gently sent a trace of Ryvia in. And indeed, her runes were in a mess, as was her pool of spirit. The sapphire rune of water that should’ve been a triangle had contorted, branches extending out with a metallic sheen, and it was tugging on her other two runes of earth and wood elements while resonating with an external wave. She was in the process of turning into a Seaborn, and the water won't let her go until it completed the transference.
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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 | Dark: 25.5]
Astylinds: 5 [Potential: 0]
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]
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Necros-Crow [Ghost]: Step-0 [Level-3] [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: 24,285
Crelith: 1,014