Asgotl, Healing Shrine of Mugash

The two-footed ones had their early repast in Lisaykos' dining room, which I couldn't get into because it only has a single, not double, door. I had my mutton out on the balcony. The shoe and the jar that leaked were both immersed in their own kettles of water, for now, to keep them from catching fire. The stuff I brought back that catches fire just by removing it from water is frightening. Emily plays with scary stuff.

When I was done eating, I wandered into Lisaykos' study and took a nap. Wolkarys took the granddaughter to meet up with her classmates and the rest of the two-footeds distributed themselves around the study and woke me up. After the King swore Katsa and Oyyuth to secrecy, it was my turn to talk.

"Emily and I considered it an oversight not to consult with her before searching the valleys north of the lava plains. Emily knows the five valleys up there better than any map. She's not recovered enough to travel but I could check places Emily identified as locations a person would visit.

"I started at the beginning of the third rotation, working my way from north to south. I began at the Valley of the Birch River, which I must say has some superb chamois hunting. There was nothing obvious along the Birch or Aspen Rivers; however, I found a hairpin along Emily's safe passage across the Great Cracks. I couldn’t grasp it with my talons so it's probably still there. Aylem, by the way, does know that route."

"What route is that?" Imstay asked. "I've never heard of a safe route on foot across the lava.”

"I found the route six years ago," said Emily. "I don't think anyone who w...wasn't on foot would find it. It takes four very long days for me to walk from Blockit to the sink of the Vanishing River."

"Imstay King," Irhessa jumped in, "I know the route. It's real. You can indeed walk across the Great Cracks; and before you ask, no, you can't get a wagon across."

"I had no idea," Imstay looked like he had swallowed something bitter. "My apologies to the three of you for doubting you. I will be good and shut my big mouth now."

I was shocked. Imstay just apologized to a griffin and a Coyn? The king had changed. I might begin to like the fellow.

I returned to my account of my travels: "I found the Queen's trail along the Vanishing River. The first thing I found was that someone, I assume Aylem Queen, had removed every rock and piece of debris out of Emily's collapsed cave, including the walls that had fallen between the three separate chambers that Emily used. The debris has been spread out and searched. Someone had gathered Emily's old belt pouch plus the three jars, and had placed them inside the base of a broken furnace."

"I presume the jar was not leaking then?" the High Priestess asked.

"Not that I noticed," I replied, Great One. "It's possible I cracked the wax seal or cracked the clay when I put it in the shoe."

"Emily, this phosphorous stuff," Lisaykos switched targets, "is it more or less dangerous than your explosive powder?"

"More," Emily answered. "It's the m...most dangerous thing I have ever made."

"This concerns me, Emily. Why do you have something like that?"

"It's an inter...mediate step for making red phosphorous, w...which is much safer."

"What is it for?" Lisaykos was radiating worry.

"Instant fire."

The words "instant fire" got Imstay's attention. "Could you use the white whatever-you-called-it to make instant fire sticks instead of the red, Great One?"

"Too dangerous," Emily replied.

"How do you make the white stuff become the red stuff?" Imstay asked.

"Heat it in water."

"That's it?"

"More or less, though you need to use a retort or alembic."

“Ahem!” I butted in to quell the chatter and resumed my narrative: "The cave site now looks very different because the floor of the former cave is exposed to the open air in its entirety.

"I left the items, meaning to return and collect them. I next checked the hot springs because Aylem and I visited Emily there early during planting season, almost a year ago." I noticed Emily had a satisfied grin on her face. I winked at her.

"Wait," Imstay interrupted again, looking at Emily, "Great One, you were dealing with Aylem that early on?"

"No," Emily looked amused. "The Queen visited my hot pool uninvited w...while I was having a soak. I knew I w...wasn't alone because Asgotl made so much noise as he tried to get through the trees to get to the hot springs. I thought it was a snow bear so I got out of the pool and got my bow, wi...w...which I always kept in reach, to shoot the bear before it could reach me."

"She scared the willies out of me," I added. "I got through the last few trees only to be looking down at the shaft of an arrow aimed right between my eyes by this little dripping-wet girl who had no clothes on. Aylem asked if it was okay to share the hot pool. Emily wasn't talking back then, but she put the bow down and got back into the pool. Aylem decided it was okay to join Emily in the hot pool, so she did.

"As soon as Aylem got comfortable in the water, Emily hopped out, put on her clothes, and gathered up her pack and bow. Then she spotted Aylem's pile of clothes, which she picked up and proceeded to hang on tree branches as she walked away. There was still a lot of snow on the ground up there, so Aylem had to go running through the snow without any clothes on to retrieve her clothes. Emily placed Aylem's underclothes, shoes and stockings the furthest away, which I thought was quite amusing, but Aylem didn't think so, for some reason."

"You stole the Queen's clothes?" Imstay was gobsmacked.

Emily smiled an evil little smile. "Y...yes and I w...would do it again in the same circumstances. I couldn't t...talk then but I w...wanted to make it clear that I did not w...welcome any visitors to my private valley. I w...was very unhappy she had crashed my hot springs."

"PFFffffft," Imstay tried not to laugh and did not succeed.

"You know, she told me she had tried to visit with you and that you vanished into the dense forest where she was too big to follow," Lisaykos added. "She never mentioned there was a hot spring there."

"I loved that hot spring," Emily sighed. "The scouts trashed it while I w...was here recovering from the eye injury. I built a nice bench in the pool with a paved path. The scouts knocked it all down, left garbage behind, and cut down several trees for reasons that are be...yond me."

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

"That's what I'm leading up to," I said, trying to get the meeting back to the main event, which was my narration. "The hot springs are all cleaned up. Even your bench is rebuilt and the paving stones replaced. The trees dropped into the pools are gone. It looks almost the same as when Aylem and I first visited."

"I found Aylem's shoe at the hot spring. I put it with the jars and pouch at the cave site. I knew for sure that I was on her trail. I checked the big fir tree where Emily had built an emergency shelter for Heldfirk and Opo'aba. It was clear that someone has used it recently. If you didn't know about that fir tree, you would never be able to find it, so I was sure it was Aylem. After that, I was able to follow her trail up to the source of the Vanishing River."

"How?" Imstay asked.

"The remains of cooked fish and campfire sites. I was trying to figure out which way she had gone when I ran into a little trouble of my own. I had crossed into the territory of a griffin clan and they didn't much like me. They chased me northwest for two days until I came to the ocean. I hid along the coast until they gave up on finding me.

"I flew south until I found the mouth of the Claw River. From there, I flew southeast until I hit the Salt River. I followed it back to the lava plains. I returned to the cave site to fetch the shoe and other items. You know the rest."

"I'll repurpose the agents who went south and east," Hessakos looked at the king, "excluding those keeping an eye on the situation between Junu and Impotu."

"Agreed," Imstay said. "Is Aylem's disappearance known out there?"

"Impotu knows. I haven't gotten good intelligence out of Junu lately, what's left of it. That's one of my current worries." Hessakos worried the base of his left thumb absently. "If the Queen gets as far as Tirmara, it could upset the reindeer riders. I'm not sure what would happen if a powerful mage like Aylem ran into any of their shamans."

"I feel sorry for any shaman who crossed her,” Imstay remarked, “though she would have to get across the Great Fen first to reach Tirmara." Imstay stared off into the distance, thinking. "We'll need to deal with those cannibals at some point. If they ever spread south again into valleys north of the Great Cracks, we should eliminate them or break up the families and assimilate the children."

Imstay frowned. "I don't understand why she hasn't returned home. The Blessed Emily released her from a divine punishment so there's nothing more anyone can do to her; not that anyone could do anything to her once she recovered her magic. So why...?"

"Why run away?" Hessakos finished Imstay's sentence with a sad little smile on his face, looking at his sister and mother.

"Yes," Imstay replied, perplexed.

"You really don't know?" Hessakos grimaced. Imstay was being very dense.

"Imstay, brother, if you run away from your family problems as the way to solve those problems, it is difficult to go back," said the voice of experience. "The problems you ran from may still be there if you return," Hessakos didn’t move his gaze from his mother. "Then there is the fear of rejection and the public shame. I thought you knew that."

The horrified look on Imstay's face signaled that he just understood what Hessakos meant. "Oh crap. I'm sorry, little brother. I am such a thoughtless idiot."

Hessakos shrugged and gave the King a knowing smile, "I know you are, but I like you anyway."

"You...!" Imstay grabbed a lounge cushion and threw it at Hessakos, who caught it and sent it flying back.

"Children!" Lisaykos scolded in a voice that tolerated no dissent. "There will be no roughhousing in my quarters. Act your age."

"He started it," Hessakos pointed a finger at the King. Lisaykos stared at her son in disapproval. Hessakos blushed and collapsed into himself, "Yes, mother."

Oyyuth and Katsa shared a look and started laughing.

"What's so funny?' Lisaykos snapped.

Katsa managed to recover her composure. "It's good to see the two of you getting along so well. I've been a bit worried about it."

"Mother Lisaykos," Oyyuth smiled, "my drawing room has been the site of some epic pillow fights between these two."

"So that's how it is," Lisaykos digested the information. “It’s good to know that our sovereign can maintain dignity in every circumstance.” She studied the King with an unreadable face. He looked back at her, confused. He sighed.

"So," Imstay returned to the matter at hand, "we need to find Aylem and convince her it's safe to come home."

"And if she doesn't want to come home?" I asked the room full of two-footeds.

"We'll deal with it, if and when it happens," Imstay declared. "Our priority remains to find her."

"I'm embarrassed our searches to the north were insufficient," Hessakos confessed. "That was my oversight but I assumed that if she went that way, it would be easy to find her trail in the new snow along the rivers."

"H...her visit to my valley may have happened after you searched it," Emily pointed out. "Everyone assumed she w...was traveling quickly, and that may have been a bad assumption."

"At least we have a trail now," Hessakos said.

"What are the other two jars that came back with Asgotl?" Lisaykos asked.

"Both are ingredients for instant fire. The potassium chlorate is fine so long as no one ever opens it. The stibnite is benign."

"Why don't you have the containers marked that way?" Lisaykos wanted to know.

"I never thought that anyone besides myself w...would handle my chemicals. I never marked them because I w...was the only person using them."

"How should they be stored while it's inside my shrine?" Lisaykos was deep into one of her annoying long-suffering patience acts.

"Put the potassium chlorate inside a much larger jar or crock w...with a lid, so if it ignites, it is contained. Put it in a cool place w...without any com...b...bustibles nearby. That's probably going further than needed, but this is your shrine and you make the rules.”

"What about the shoe and the phosphorous, Emily?"

"The shoe should be burnt since it's already halfway to being destroyed. The best thing for the white phosphorus would be to convert it to red phosphorus, but I lost all my equipment to do that in the explosion. For now, just keep it in the kettle and keep the water topped off. Alternatively, we could just expose it to air with a charm of w...warmth and let it burn to nothingness. I'd rather not do that since it took two long smelly years to produce w...what's in that jar, and I w...would hate to repeat that. But this is your shrine, Lisaykos, do w...what you need to do and I will abide by it."

"Can you not buy new equipment, Great One?" Imstay asked.

With another unreadable face, Emily explained in a sad, soft voice: "Y...you can't buy the equipment I lost. I m...made every piece by hand. I fired every brick. I built every one of my six furnaces from the ground up. I m...made my own charcoal. I forged my own tools. I cast my own pots and pans. I carved all my casting molds. I made my own casting sand. I smelted my own copper and I made my own iron and steel. That's w...why the loss of my home is so painful, even now. I lost years of w...work and all my notes. Can y...you give those five years back to me, Imstay King?" She nailed him with a motionless unwavering look.

The king closed his eyes and grimaced. "I think I am beginning to understand just how much you lost through the actions of my scouts. I don't think I could bear it if this had happened to me. Your reply to General Bobbo when I sent him to negotiate finally makes sense to me. There is no treasure in Foskos that could ever repay you for your home and workshop and your way of life. That was the real message in your reply to me and I was too stupid to see it."

"Yes, that w...was the real message and it was also a test for you, Imstay King. You failed it. Do not think that I missed the intent of your scouts to capture me and confiscate my possessions. If Tiki had not made me a revelator, I might be in danger from y...you still."

The two of them stared at each other for a long uncomfortable interval.

"Why aren't you angry with me?" a frowning Imstay asked, breaking the impasse.

"I w..was extremely angry, for a long time," Emily admitted in her slow and soft voice, in the same tone she used for discussing a recipe or talking about the weather. "I still am rather unhappy over the whole situation and all the setbacks I've suffered over the last year. But it’s a w...waste of time obsessing over w...what was lost and can't be replaced easily. It's a fool's errand to spend effort on things I can't fix or change so I w..will do what I always have done, and move on with life, spending my efforts on the things I can achieve."

All the Cosm in the room were shocked speechless. If I'm not mistaken, the King looked a bit scared.

"Are we enemies, Great One?" Imstay asked in a neutral voice.

"Given that I am currently residing within your kingdom, that is not to my advantage," Emily smiled without mirth. "Rather, I find it fortuitous for the King of Foskos to be in my debt."

The screaming silence was shorter this time but much heavier.

"I see," Imstay King said, once again breaking the frozen tableau.

---