After Aylie had left to go see the damage the kittens had done, Zalia stayed around and fiddled with the teleportation ritual a little more. She tried further and further distances until the small ritual no longer functioned, finding it could only work across a couple of kilometres without making it larger. That was until she made it to Gold and could raise the rank of all her herbs to Gold as well. If she made it to Gold.
She was more sure of the idea to head into Astar lands as the hours passed. Yes, Hildebrandt and Faian had cautioned her to be wary but she wasn’t going to go in there to start a war. Instead, she wanted to scout them out, try and learn something that could help. With her living rituals being almost imperceptable as anything other than natural, they would be able to set up a little home base that was well hidden somewhere deep in the Astar’s territory.
Eventually, she broke down the two living rituals, returned her armour’s gauntlets to their place within her storage and started the walk back to town. The size of the living ritual required to make a portal from Nature’s Reclaim to the capital would be quite large, with something like a living ritual from Nature’s Reclaim to the mountain home of the Born of Heat and Stone people being massive. It would have to be half the size of the town at least, something that she was capable of now but also something that would take a day or more.
That wasn’t to say it wasn’t worth doing, more that she had more important things to do right now. Maybe it was something she could come back to down the line as a higher-ranked Druid, or, something that might become useful in their stay in the Astar lands. In fact, she had an idea on how to use it there already.
The town of Nature’s Reclaim was thriving, with the population having adopted the early days ideas of the Ancient of Wisdom. People didn’t use coin anymore here, simply trading goods to get what they wanted. Zalia preferred it, happy with how respectful people were to each other. She had made it clear in the early days that anyone who was to stay here would have to be good to everyone else.
She nodded to a quokka that waddled past, admiring the leather armour it wore, the cheery smile on its face in conflict with its muscled body, armour and Bronze rank in what was obviously a warrior class of some sort.
It was a little strange how classes worked for humans. None of the animal population of Nature’s Reclaim had classes as such, even Boreal didn’t have one, instead just being titled as a creature type of Mountain Frostfang. It wasn’t something she had ever thought about while the war had been going on but with the past few years, it was something that had interested her more and more.
She had three classes, two normal ones and a unity class, which was something unusual even amongst the already unusual humans. At first, Zalia had thought it had to do with humans normally higher levels of sentience and sapience to most other animals but had learned the Bathar, who were on a similar level of those things to humans, also didn’t have classes. Instead, they were born with abilities that were already fit for the nature of the person. Or perhaps each Bathar developed into a person that fit their born abilities, it was hard to tell.
This felt like another piece in the ever-expanding puzzle Zalia was trying to figure out, a puzzle to which she had been given neither the image nor border pieces for. Perhaps one day, she would find something that would give her a better idea of what exactly caused her to have three classes.
Saying that, she wasn’t complaining about it at all. It had certainly been helpful and she would go so far as to say it had saved her life on more than one occasion, though she couldn’t say if she would have taken the same risks without.
If they did end up going to the Astar lands, she would have loved to take Hildebrandt or Ro-ak with them, either of the powerful allies capable of killing almost any creature Zalia knew of. With her uniquely powerful tank abilities, Zalia wasn’t even sure if Hildebrandt could be killed. Surprisingly, out of the people she knew, Aylie had the highest chance of accomplishing that. Though, who was to say if Ascendants were capable of making attacks against the soul or not.
Thinking about all of her old friends brought Zalia’s mind to Delphi and the collective. Their memories still sat in her storage, centuries of thoughts, foreseen futures and experiences collected in one big, jumbled mess that she still couldn’t make heads or tails of. More than a few times over the past years she had tried to decipher more of the mess and hadn’t completely failed. She had gotten flashes of past events, days shared with Delphi in Cormaine, images of people she had never met or things that she had no idea whether they had happened yet or were so far in the past as to be unimportant. It all might have meaning if she was able to recall all the memories in their chronological order but the stored memories of dozens, even hundreds of collective members all pushed into her mind at once was an absolute mess.
She would have sent the memories off to someone more capable if she could, but wasn’t even able to accomplish that. At least in her storage, they would remain untouched by time’s inevitable warping of the mind.
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There was another item sitting in her storage that had been occupying her mind of late, that being the little pouch containing the ritual Juniper had tried to use to summon demons from Cormaine. At least, that was unless Zalia was right about the ritual Juniper had performed being originally intended to drag Juniper to Cormaine where she would die, all part of the Astar plan.
It might be possible for her to figure out that ritual and use it to her own ends, a way of getting them into Cormaine when the time came. She knew that Ro-ak, Nateysta, wanted to return there to end the demons once and for all. From what they had gathered from the keep in Cormaine, the Bathar had somehow developed a way of moving between the worlds in the ages past, as they had originally come from that world. Perhaps that had been the ability of a single powerful mage however, not an impossibility.
Lost in thought, Zalia was almost back at the town when she sensed something… strange.
From the past hours of staring into portals, she was keyed into that type of magic, her mind having just spent a long time analysing it. When she felt that same type of energy fizzing around her, Zalia acted immediately.
At the same time that she summoned her armour and sword, she cast the very same ritual that stopped teleportation magic in the town around herself. It activated just as an Astar appeared, hand reaching out to grab her.
Its hand closed on her shoulder, her ritual stopped it from teleporting away with her and she severed its arm in a brutal slash. The startled look of surprise on its face, one of the very few times Zalia had seen them make an expression, was wiped off with a well-put and concisely explained fist to the face. The fist was followed by a blade through the chest, which swept upwards as Zalia twisted the blade around, grabbed the blade further down with her hand and pushed it up.
Just like that, the Astar died.
It had been Silver rank, same as her, but obviously untrained in the art of combat. Zalia on the other hand, had just had an entire war’s worth of trauma, combat experience and the instincts honed through a lifetime as a hunter awakened in a single moment.
A few of the nearby townspeople, animals and humans both, looked over at her startled but Zalia grabbed the body before it dropped, storing away her blade, then opened the portal to her storage and stomped in there, slamming the body into one of the storage slots.
She left that portal, letting it close before dashing to the town entrance, yelling for everyone to get inside.
Having heard her mental call, all of her family and the Ancient of War were racing to the gates.
She raced through the streets as the town gates closed behind her, the buildings flashing past in a blur as she reached speeds that very few people could achieve. It was less than a minute before she met her family rushing toward the gate and she swept her gaze over them in a quick examination. It looked like everyone was alright. She would never know if the Astar had tried to take any of them at the same time as if they had tried, the ritual she had created had stopped them.
A vision flashed through her mind, the Astar capturing her family while she remained the only one free. The vision progressed, her, alone, searching through forests and unknown lands, chasing the bond between herself and her faraway family. Astar dying to her sword one by one, yet her loved ones never recovered.
She gasped as the vision faded away, back to where it was stored in the clump of collective memories.
That was why she had been so on edge about the Astar. That was why she had felt the need to set up a zone of anti-teleportation now. She couldn’t decipher the collective’s memories, many of them memories that had yet to happen, but on some level, she could understand them. Once, she’d had issues with the powers of the collective, their ability to see into the future and know what would happen. She had thought the ability was somehow capable of stripping her freedom of choice. Yet today, it had helped her change a future that she would do anything to avoid.
Ember was examining her, eyes flicking over the blood that coated her gauntlets, its unnatural shiny darkness.
“The Astar?” she asked.
Zalia nodded.
She explained what had just happened, including everything about the collective’s memories and the future she had just seen.
At her agreement, the Ancient of War ran off to activate many of the traps around the town, even going so far as to activate the dormant living rituals that awakened earthen guardians around the perimeter.
“I knew they would try something, I just knew it! I couldn’t shake the feeling. Gods, it makes sense now.”
Ember eyed her.
“And going to the Astar lands, you still think we should do that?”
Zalia nodded decisively.
“Yes, without a doubt.”
Ember gave her silent assent and they both looked to Boreal.
The feline stared at the blood dripping from Zalia’s gauntlets then looked up, giving a deep, deep growl of anger. Boreal wanted to draw blood of her own.