It was a week after they agreed to leave for the Astar lands that they finally left Nature’s Reclaim. There was a lot of preparation they needed to do as town leaders and even further as parents to ensure that nothing went wrong at home or on their journey.
By mutual agreement, Zalia focused on getting what they needed for the journey while Ember worked on everything else.
Ember had messages sent out to Faian and Hildebrandt, letting them know what had happened, where they were going and why. She made sure to promise that they wouldn’t do anything foolish that would start an all-out war. While Zalia thought that was a good thing to promise, in her mind they were already at war. They just hadn’t realised this was how the Astar waged it.
She also spoke with the Ancient of Wisdom in Nature’s Reclaim and made sure they had everything they needed, to which she was assured everything would be fine.
Ember did the same in the other Grove, the one located in the desert south of Endaria. They finally had an Ancient of Wisdom there, it having taken much longer due to the lower animal density in the desert. The Ancient of Wisdom in that Grove was like a fennec fox with fur that shimmered like a mirage, making the fox extremely hard to see.
Few people had decided to move to the desert Grove, preferring Nature’s Reclaim due to its less hostile and more beautiful environment. Many did travel through the portal to go there, however, enjoying the deep warmth of the oasis springs.
Zalia had been surprised to find that some dozen desert dwellers from the city of Ulzahar had decided to move to the Grove after Sazcha had told them about it. Many of them said they were tired of the constant struggle for survival that living in Ulzahar entailed, choosing to live in the calmer, more relaxed desert Grove. That wasn’t to say they didn’t pull their weight, as they were still incredibly hard workers.
While Ember worked on all that, Zalia had been working on getting everything ready for the journey. The preparations for the journey that she had to make looked very different to how one might expect, their needs being wildly off the norm due to the capabilities of their magic.
They didn’t need tents nor any form of cover, having a perfect place to sleep in Zalia’s spatial storage. Neither did they really need to bring any food, though she did pack a good portion of dried nuts, berries and salted, dried meats all stored in her spatial storage.
No, the majority of her preparation time went into working with Boreal to school the kittens.
She explained to them where they were going and why they were going there but she made no illusions as to the trip being anything other than dangerous. They were still understandably excited about the trip and it took Zalia and Boreal the week to get across to them that they would need to be responsible. Attacking the wrong thing or making too much noise at the wrong time could lead to painful consequences. They would need to be on guard, watching for danger and careful of their every move, constantly.
Zalia knew this was a risk, a big one. She also knew it was a necessary one.
The five needed to learn as soon as possible how the real world was. The brutality of nature, the way the world could beat you down over and over and it was up to you to pick yourself back up again each time. But, she also didn’t want them to have to learn that the way she did.
When she had left home at a young age to live by herself in the wild, frozen north of her world, she had been running from something, looking backwards at what she was trying to escape but not looking forward to what she would have to survive. That mistake had almost cost her life more than once.
Here, the kittens would experience that but if it came to it, Zalia, Ember and Boreal were all around to ensure they didn’t pay for a mistake with their lives. There was no reason to allow any of them to die in the process of trying to teach them how to survive.
This wasn’t a lesson she had to teach Aylie. No, Aylie had already learnt that lesson at far too young an age in a horrible, scarring way. The only thing Aylie needed was love and support.
There was one other thing that Zalia did during that week of preparation time. The incident outside the city walls had her thinking that while a zone of anti-teleportation was good, it wasn’t exactly helpful for anyone outside the town bounds, anyone who, say, was travelling long distances each day in hostile territory.
So she tried making something that was a little more portable.
The result of her efforts was an armband of herbs stalks woven together, made from the same herbs that the ritual of anti-teleportation required.
It wasn’t active all the time, unfortunately, laying dormant but still useful as all the wearer had to do to activate it was push a tiny bit of magic into it. This did lead to Zalia learning that this wasn’t something that any of the others, even Aylie and Ember knew how to do. None of them had abilities that needed them to do that with, simply activating their spells and letting them work. The way Herbal Magic worked meant that Zalia instinctively knew how to create and activate rituals, by pushing her mana into them.
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Everyone else was capable of performing these herbal rituals, they just needed a much, much longer time and a lot of learning to do it. If any of them put in the time to carefully lay out the herbs for a ritual in the right configuration, they could push their mana into it to activate it just as Zalia did. Her advantage was in being able to instinctively create rituals in an instant.
After teaching her whole family how to manipulate their mana in this way, Zalia finally got them all to activate the armbands at least once each.
The armbands were one use each, falling to dust after their power was used. What they did do was provide whoever wore them about thirty seconds of time in which they wouldn’t be able to be teleported. That time could be increased by feeding them more mana but in the event of an Astar attack, Zalia would simply create a larger ritual and feed that for as long as was needed, the mana use more efficiently than if everyone was maintaining their own. It also stopped the Astar teleporting, making them easier to kill.
Aylie made some of her own preparations as well. She had acquired a backpack of the type Zalia had used long ago, an enchanted one that allowed you to store as much as you wanted in it so long as you could still carry the weight of all those items combined. In it, she had stored a tent, some food, an enchanted rock that could be used to create a fire, spare clothes and even a few potions that would heal or remove disease, sickness and other ailments.
All of her meticulous preparation, while possibly over-eager, made Zalia proud. Aylie wasn’t planning to be caught unprepared it seemed.
It made sense for her to keep some things outside of Zalia’s storage, as it wasn’t certain they would remain together. They might get separated for one reason or another and in that case, the people who needed to eat might find themselves suddenly without a source of food.
Ember knew how to hunt, even if she wasn’t great at it, while the kittens were… well, Zalia was sure they would figure it out.
With everything prepared, they set out. Amongst their group was Ember, Zalia, Aylie, Boreal and her children, Frost, Pounce, Prance, Breeze and Rush. The only one from amongst their family that didn't join them was Lumin. Instead, Lumin had gone to spend time with Ro-ak, also known as Nateysta. Apparently, there were some things that he wanted to teach the little Ascendant pup, some things about his powers that the others were too low rank to yet learn.
Nature's Reclaim was quite central to the kingdom, being right in the middle of the farthest north and farthest south points and just a bit east of the centre, where the capital stood.
Zalia, Ember, Aylie and Boreal were all used to travelling and soon set into a comfortable, easy pace that their magically enhanced bodies had no trouble with. The kittens, however, soon grew tired. They were the lowest rank in the group and unused to long-distance travelling.
Over the course of the first few days, they had to stop more frequently because of this but as they were unhurried, Zalia didn't particularly mind.
The kittens slowly grew used to this but as they did, the others picked up the pace even more.
Zalia had learnt long ago that while it was easy to rely on the strength and endurance you gained from rank, you could still train and become stronger or more enduring than someone else of the same rank who didn't.
It also came down to your natural state of being. She'd learnt that when as an Iron rank she could defeat higher ranked Ironfur rabbits simply because she was so much bigger than them, the same way that Boreal as a full-grown Bronze rank was so, so much scarier than a full-grown Bronze rank human.
She wondered if that had something to do with her having three classes. If it wasn't anything other than where she was from that gave her the advantage.
Had she been alone or had it just been her and Boreal, she would have travelled all through each night and day without stopping for food or rest. As it was, however, the group stopped often to hunt, rest and sleep as much as was required.
It was a long journey before they arrived at what the Endarians thought of as the border of their lands between them and the Astar. They stopped there for a time, looking out across a flat marshland filled with flitting insects and the occasional animal roaming through the wet, spongy land. There would undoubtedly be unknown threats laying in wait in the marshes but Zalia was confident that they would be alright. They might be able to defeat a Gold rank animal if it came to it, as animals usually only had one class and two or three bonded attributes.
After a brief rest, Ember and the children all eating a bit of food, they set off down the hill and into the marshes.
It stank like rotting things, the insects trying to figure out some way they could eat the passersby but failing to do so thankfully. The ground underfoot wasn’t an issue to Zalia, Boreal or the kittens but did become so for Aylie and Ember. Boreal fixed that issue by freezing the ground along their path, turning the high water content earth under them rock solid.
A few days of travel in the marshes had them used to the tedium and they had to start eating into the supplies of food that Zalia had brought. While they had seen a few animals from above looking down on the marshes, they had only managed to find one such animal to hunt while down here. A strange, slimy frog-looking thing that was as large as a horse. Zalia had a feeling that most creatures found ways to hide amongst the still water and spongy earth with skill. She would use Hunter’s Sight to find them, if it came to it, but didn’t particularly feel like hunting in an area that ambushing creatures may lie in waiting.
Her fears became realised the day after as they travelled.
They were walking through the seemingly endless marshes as they had for the past few days, stepping over the frozen ground towards the horizon when with a crackling sound the ground under their group exploded upwards.
Everyone was flung into the air, Zalia and two of the kittens going one direction, Ember and Boreal in another, Aylie and two kittens in another and Pounce in a fourth. The creature that had attacked was a huge earthworm with a gaping toothless maw. It stood ten metres out of the ground with who knew how much more of it under the ground.
Zalia caught the kittens midair, reorienting herself masterfully and freezing the ground under her before she landed, dropping Prance and Breeze as she did. Her bow appeared next to her, floating on its own, and she launched herself at the creature, ready to fight.