Riding a flokka was a very different experience to riding a horse. Sera had only done so once, but that was enough. It wasn’t anything like riding an elephant either, which she’d tried as a child at a Renaissance Faire. There was a certain fluidity to their movement, and they maintained a steady pace no matter what kind of ground they trod upon. On a horse, the rider moves with every step their mount takes, jostled about by the shifting of the bone and muscle beneath.
A flokka didn’t bounce the rider unevenly as on a horse. The entire torso seemed to move up and down evenly as part of a cycle of movements the animal went through as it walked. It was hard for Sera to put into words, never having really watched a flokka in motion from the side, but she knew from media that horse riding was supposed to involve moving with the horse, not just passively sitting on its back. That wasn’t possible on a flokka, because of the total lack of side to side movement.
Verinilla and Soswa were also very confident in the woods. Their strange feet didn’t so much pick their way through what footholds there were as they did conform themselves to stand on surfaces too narrow or rugged to support a foot or hoof. Sera would liken it to the way human hands could adjust to grip a variety of objects, just applied in a very different manner. It was hard to imagine how the flokka were able to support their weight properly like that.
It was also apparent to Sera that neither animal was fearful of what might be lurking in the forest. Combined with what Tiriana had said about them lacking a fear of people and being found on an isolated island, it was easy to conclude that these creatures simply had no natural predators to be wary of.
As a result of all of those factors, she and Tiriana were maintaining a pace well above walking even when passing through the forest. Or at least, the pace they would be walking at in a forest; it was likely no faster than a human could walk on flat ground. Which was good, because it allowed them to get quite a bit further than they would have otherwise before Sera was forced to ask for a stop as a result of having a saddle jammed into her butt repeatedly for a good two hours.
Even after they had pulled into a small clearing, it took Sera a few moments to alight from the saddle, and when she did, it was with gingerly movements. Every movement of her legs sent spikes of pain through her rear end, but she had to move about just to get the blood flowing properly again, so she had no choice but to put up with it as she tied Verinilla’s reins to a tree.
“Saddle sores?” Tiriana asked, bemused, as she fished around in her pack. Sera just grunted an affirmation as she rubbed the tender spots gently, wishing the pain would stop. After a few moments, Tiriana handed her a small tin of something with a knowing smile. “It’s a cream for alleviating sores. Just go behind a tree or something and apply a bit.”
“Thanks. I’m surprised the solution is so…mundane and non-magical, though, I have to admit,” Sera commented as she took the tin and shuffled towards cover.
“Well, magic is hard to use on other people, and miracles are usually saved for things that aren’t just mild discomfort,” came the reply from the other side of the tree.
“My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined,” Sera retorted in a monotone. She was careful to put some space between her sores and pants while she pulled them down, not wishing to find out how it would feel to drag fabric over the tender skin.
After a short break they remounted their flokkas and continued on, with Tiriana assuring her that it wasn’t much further until they reached the frontier. Sera wasn’t sure that would really make a difference since they’d presumably still be riding once they entered it, though she’d be damned if she complained about it after insisting on tagging along.
Even Sera could tell once they got close. Through the greenery she picked out flashes of white, along with the occasional sparkle of something reflective. When they finally stepped through the boundary between old land and new, Sera found herself in another world- again.
The first thing she noticed was the trees, which were bizarre in every way. The most common type stood straight from the ground like spikes, with branches that protruded from the trunk at various angle but never once bent. Their bark was smooth and white, eye-searingly so, and their leaves were broad, flat, and red. Others were like a child’s interpretation of a pine tree, featuring rings of branches that extended further from the tree the closer they were to the ground and bristled with thin, spiky red leaves.
Next she noticed the rocks on the ground- something typically beneath notice but here quite noteworthy. There were stones of every color, and they looked for all the world like gaudy trinkets coated in cheap metallic paint. As she examined them, one seemed to move, and just as she was attempting to discern whether it was merely her imagination, a blur shot out of a nearby tree and snatched it up. Now that she knew to look for it, she spotted an animal of some kind clinging to the trunk, its white hide blending in almost perfectly.
“Are the rocks alive, or do the animals eat rocks…?” she asked, not really expecting an answer.
“I think some of the rocks are just animals that disguise themselves as rocks,” Tiriana answered tentatively. “I’ve tried to find one of the moving ones, but I have no idea how to tell them apart.”
“The trees are pretty weird too…never seen nature produce lines that straight,” Sera observed as she tried to shield her eyes from the intense glare produced by the landscape.
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“One of my colleagues cut one down and said they have a bit of metal in them. I guess it helps them maintain their shape.”
“How is there even enough metal in the soil for all these trees…?”
“That is a question we’d probably need a biologist for. Or maybe a geologist. A metallurgist? I’m not sure,” the elf admitted.
“Are a lot of frontiers this…weird?”
“No, they’re rare. Though, I wrote a paper on one from a few centuries ago in school,” Tiriana said, furrowing her brows as she tried to remember. “There were islands that floated in the sky. But one day they just fell, all at once. The consensus was that sometimes frontiers come from places with different rules, but once they’re here, the ambient mana slowly overwrites them until they follow the rules of Omichlódis.”
“Right, because you said mana warps reality. Are you saying you think this frontier might be similar? With different laws of physics?”
“Maybe. We probably won’t know unless it all falls apart, or we find something that should be impossible.”
“That would be kind of…sad,” Sera said with a frown. As unnatural as this environment looked, it was also beautiful in its own way. It was an odd blend of order and disorder, full of trees that looked like they were made from a template but also home to the chaotic panoply of metallic rocks that littered the forest floor. And this was just the edge of a much larger region. Who knew what kind of bizarre sights awaited them further in?
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, everything here probably still exists somewhere. It’s not like that entire world is here, and if it were just a unique island, it would have still been one,” said Tiriana as she unrolled a map. Sera urged Verinilla closer so that she could take a peak, and Tiriana tilted it so she could see.
There wasn’t actually much to see, though. It mostly defined the shape of the border between this forest and the more normal one they’d left behind, with a shaded area indicating how far they’d confirmed the forest went on for.
“Everyone is responsible for mapping in a different direction,” Tiriana explained unprompted before tracing one calloused finger across the map to the right of the center. “We’re around here. This time I’m planning on just going straight ahead instead of covering a wide area, since we’ve checked the forest itself pretty thoroughly for ruins. If we’re in luck we might found out how far the forest extends for.”
“Is that a large area? I don’t see any measurements,” Sera said while examining the blobs that currently passed for a map. Tiriana shook her head in response.
“This is all a rough estimation. Any surveys we did right now would be meaningless since we only have arbitrary points inside the forest to go by. We still wouldn’t really be able to tell how far anything is while we’re inside it,” she elaborated, which also gave Sera some insight on why she wanted to see where the forest ends. Then they would be able to definitively state that the forest ends ‘x’ distance from the border.
After that, they continued on in silence for some time, exchanging words mostly just to discuss breaks. As they rode on, so too did the luminary in the sky continue its own trek, shifting the light and shadows in the forest like they were the inside of a kaleidoscope. Sera spent some time wondering what a time lapse of the forest might look like, and wishing she had the equipment to take one. Every rock was shaped differently, and reflected the light differently, and caught the light on different facets depending on the time of day.
It was mesmerizing, and probably the biggest reason so few words passed between the women as they travelled.
Eventually twilight began to fall, and they had to stop and make camp. Tiriana showed Sera how to hang their tent using the conveniently straight branches jutting from every tree. Sera tried to start a fire using the equipment in her pack, only for Tiriana to just light it with magic when she took too long. Verinilla found a rock bug and ate it before Tiriana could get a closer look.
She was a bit despondent after that.
Finally night fell, and after a meal made from conjured water and concentrated soup mix, Tiriana and Sera settled into their tent for the night. As they spread out their bed rolls they were serenaded by the odd scraping and clicking sounds of the wildlife.
“What’s stopping wild animals from attacking us at night?” Sera spoke into the relative silence, pausing as she was climbing into her bed roll. Normally she would have expected someone to keep watch, although the thought had only occurred to her just now.
“I set up some wards while you were failing to start a fire,” Tiriana quipped. “We’ll hear it if anything enters the field, trust me.”
“How are you maintaining them along with the translation spell, much less while sleeping?”
“Well, mages don’t graduate without being able to maintain at least two passive spells while casting an active one, but in this case, I’m not. I just charged a connected set of reusable wards and placed them around the camp.” Tiriana pulled her sleeping bag shut and zipped it up as she spoke. “Anyway…good night.”
With that, Tiriana put a finger to her head and went limp, and Sera realized she’d put herself to sleep instantly with a spell.
“Wha…? No fair!” she exclaimed. “At least teach me how to do it too…”
Unlike Tiriana, Sera would have to lay in bed for a while before she got any sleep.
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Codex Entry: Frontiers
'Frontiers' are new regions that appear on the edges of Omichlódis. Prior to their transference mist appears on their native planet, and over a period of time determined by the size of the frontier, it builds into a thick fog before abruptly vanishing. To the occupants of the frontier it seems like a fog merely appears and then disappears, and only when they find the edge of their lands has changed due to they realize something has happened.
The formation of frontiers has a number of known rules that are followed. First, they always represent a complete unit. A frontier may be an village, a city, or even a country, but it will never be half a village or half a country. Uninhabited frontiers represent a complete biome, and adjacent frontiers always have biomes that would logically abut. A beach will always border water, and a tropical forest will never appear alongside a tundra. In addition, frontiers always match the environment that would be present at the equivalent latitude on a globe, starting at 90 degrees north and moving towards 90 degrees south as one progresses towards the outer rim.
Anecdotal evidence suggests frontiers are places that would have been destroyed if they were not transferred. Mistwalkers from Earth have related that Atlantis sank beneath the sea, while those from Tir na Nog have myths about Hy Brasil being destroyed by a volcano. It is impossible to verify this with uninhabited frontiers, but some would suggest the same may hold true for mistwalkers, and that the imminent cessation of existence is what allows Omichlódis to take hold and absorb chunks of other worlds in the first place.