Raika senses the change in the trees before she sees it. The Tallwoods, as the centaur calls them, start to change color, and more importantly, they begin to shrink. It’s not all that notable at first- the difference of 4 kilometer-tall trees to 3-and-a-half isn’t so distinct as to be immediately noticeable. The flavor of Qi changes with them, though- slightly less ripe with the concepts of growth and life, though still saturated with them, As the Qi changes, and as the Tallwoods shrink, and as the leaves go from an almost agonizingly bright green to a color more like a shifting sunset color, she tastes the point where the woods turn into something else.
Singheart is beautiful.
The trees have, after so many hours of high-speed travel, turned from pillars towards the heavens as tall or taller than any sect platforms into more “common” sizes and shapes. They lean, grow in arcs and organic curves rather than purely straight, and their branches reach far enough, close enough to the ground, to intermingle with each other, weaving into complex knots. The roots and vines that previously made up whole canyons now make up a far more complex maze, overlapping into underground chambers and strange combinations of hallways and natural growth.
At first, Raika thinks that it has to do purely with the changes to the Qi. Without the abundant life-flavored Qi growing the trees, and being refueled by the concept of their growth in turn, then surely they just didn’t grow as high.
It’s only as she crests a hill made of the now interwoven trees and glimpses something miles away that she realizes that isn’t quite correct. It’s a factor, true- the ever-shifting tides and patterns she can faintly taste in the 4th ring change the world in turn, leading to places like the alien prairie of stone and the Tallwoods, but that’s not the only thing that affects change in these parts.
Raika stares at a tree, on the horizon, that is much shorter than the Tallwoods- but more than twice as wide. Its trunk is a rich russet-brown, almost like her skin, and it has branches on it with sets of leaves wide enough to plant buildings atop. Its canopy is like a rich, luscious dome of autumnal colors shot through with a vibrant, almost technicolor green exception here and there, like stars in a sunset sky.
And as she steps onto the shorter, interwoven trees that make up a dense canopy ahead, she can taste the Qi running through them. Old, and seamlessly connecting from branch to branch, root to root.
It’s all one tree.
And there, near its base, is Singheart.
Just as the one tree has roots which have flowered into tree-forms in turn, so has the place beneath the boughs spread from a central point. Even from miles away, she can see the glint of what looks like a crystal, shaped into a blade or some sort of edge and thrust deep into the tree’s trunk. It is long-healed, the colossal florae having grown around the damage, but the crystal still glints with a bright blue-green color, like a mirage of atmospheric light in the sky or the last hints of day through a deep and living sea. Around the crystalline construct are buildings, interwoven with strings of further crystals, possibly taken from the original pillar.
The buildings seem to be directly interwoven with nature, leaves bent around each other to form rooms and chambers, vines made into more intentional mazes. Nothing that she can see, at least not from this far out, seems to be constructed from pieces severed from the whole. Nothing looks carved or intentionally deconstructed for pieces- everything is intermingled symbiotically through the architecture.
It’s miles away, and even with the lights shining out from between the intermingled trees, she can tell that there’s more hidden out of sights.
And the Pale Thresher stops.
It goes from movement to perfect stillness without even seeming to try. Momentum vanishes, and it comes to a resting point as easily as if it had only been walking.
The centaur beastkin keeps moving, seeming not to notice the change, and Raika calls to him.
“Is it alright to split up?” she asks.
The centaur turns over its shoulder, smiling. “I’d rather it not be anywhere near a population center. The Pack generally agrees.”
“And it just… listens?”
“I have absolutely no idea what it listens to,” he says, laughing. “But at the moment, it’s not going around slaughtering, and that’s enough for me.”
She nods. Fair enough.
Still, she keeps an eye on the creature as she moves. A small eye, one partially hidden by the shape of her shoulder blades and all-pupil, so the white of sclera doesn’t stand out- but an eye nonetheless.
It does not move. Doesn’t make any indication that it’s noticed her watching. It just stands on a branch, perfectly still, like some weird sort of art project.
Until something flits by.
She doesn’t actually see it move. One moment, its stationary, and the other, it has one long, slender-fingered hand holding a bird delicately between its claws.
The bird is still alive, and even as she watches, the nails on its fingers push gently further and further into its warm body.
They turn a corner, and her eyesight stops being able to show her the shape of the Thresher.
Her synesthesia allows her to watch every moment of the little bird’s struggle. And how quickly it is dropped as another, fresher victim flits by.
…yeah. She won’t be fighting that thing, not for a long fucking time.
Always good to be prepared, though.
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The anvil-altar rings eerily as she works.
Every change she brings into being makes it emit a noise, like it’s shimmering or vibrating just out of space with the rest of her. It hums with barely contained power as she toys with it, each and every one of the veins of Qi running through her inner world intersecting in one of two places- at the pond, or in the anvil.
Or altar. She’s not sure which fits it better.
Either way, she works.
[Artistry Of Reshaping Function] reacts on command, following prompts easily and quickly. She brings forth materials, and it reshapes them into function, as is its very being, bit by bit.
She reaches a hand into a tree of naked blades, of sharp corners and cutting edges, and pulls from it part of its concept. Her arm is slashed open, her being quivering with the sound of division sharpening open her being, and she feels the scars that decorate the form of her Soul resonate with it. She places it on the altar, and [Artistry Of Reshaping Function] hones it, holding it firm and keeping it from falling / fusing / always being a part of the Tree again.
She reaches her hand into the thinner tree, which reeks of brimstone and has bullets and cartridges for leaves. She feels herself burn, be opened up to the air, be torn apart and penetrated by violence and things that should not be. She feels newer scars resonating deeply, like every memory of every gunshot she’s ever fired or felt upon her.
It too goes on the altar.
She calls, and the life of her world answers. Her own flesh, taken from her Body outside, bubbles up out of the earth and up onto the altar, and from across the valleys, hopping, crawling, skittering, flying things travel towards the hill. Many of them die on the way, but those that arrive, armed with tools and strange forms and brimming with mutation and mechanisms, are almost the size of her forearm, where they once were less than the size of her finger.
She takes two ingots of Radiant Metal, manifesting them from where they lay on the ground of her world into her hand. She takes a piece of her left arm, just as alive and real as the rest of her but also simultaneously false, artificial, and made of pure black metal that radiates Killing Intent and the concept of the End.
If she is to make a weapon, it needs to be one that can grow with her. No need to make just one, but it has to be more than the weapons she’s been creating and then dissolving almost as quickly. This needs to be something more.
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With a thought, she calls forth a [Star Of Roiling Plasma] down from the sky, until it floats right above the hill, until the grass begins to warp.
Behind her, she can feel the trees of both Flame and Lightning begin to grow, bit by bit, draining Dao from the [Star Of Roiling Plasma]. She has to hold it back by force, pulling the two parts of her soul-space apart by force of will.
It’s too much.
It’s not enough.
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Hark, travelers!”
Raika’s Mind is pulled from the Soul’s struggle as she hears the voice, snapping back to full consciousness in time to come to a halt on a nearby vine. The multiple tails and many limbs make balancing much easier than normal, but even still, at her speed, it cracks the branch, collapsing it partially inward.
And isn’t that interesting- beneath the crust of the branch, like the shell of an egg, there’s a strange, creamy liquid, slightly yellowed but mostly off-white.
No time to address that. Threat assessment-
Two cultivators and a man that is not a cultivator at all step out from behind the trees.
…How did she not sense them? She thought she overcame the art of hiding one’s Intent- she can still trace their literal existence, their heartbeats and sweat and movement. Right? So why couldn’t she see them? Another technique?
“Hark!” says the centaur. “This one is honored to be greeted. Hail and well met.”
“This one is honored to greet you!” says the person in the lead with a dazzling smile. “It has been some time since you last entered our lands, Lord Aurick. We hope that your travels have guided you well, and are grateful to greet this stranger you have traveled alongside.”
Before she can finish processing, the woman with the dazzling smile bows in her direction.
Each of the three individuals is distinct, but not exclusively so. For one thing, all of them wear the clothing of woven grass that reminds her of her comatose passenger, Wei Zin.
On the other hand, each of them feels so distinct from each other that it’s hard not to tell them apart.
The woman at the forefront of the trio is tall and broad shouldered, somewhat heavyset but seemingly filled with boundless energy. She has olive-tan skin and bright green eyes, her head shaved bald and tattooed with strange swirls in black ink, and her Qi smells like a sunny summer day atop a dazzling, bubbling marsh- and beneath the muck and the bubbles, the endless spring of life, beast swim and roam and-
The next one, standing to her right and a bit behind her, seems meek enough to be a custodian or something, yet exudes a sense of pressure that she actually has to blink at. Warrior realm, and deep into it, too. She can taste the scent of honey coming off his pale skin, a sweetness of protection and reproduction kept deep beneath the ground, away from the light- and the thing inside that below-place coils and buzzes, harsh and sweet in even tones-
Fuck. What is that?
They’re not like what she’s smelled before. Their Qi seems almost alive, less a collection of properties and more a living, swirling thing. They remind her of-
Of Fisher.
What was it he’d said?
“ Lil teeny things with two steps and not a sound. They ain’t got no Domains proper, they just got vignettes. There’s no story to ‘em.”
He’d been talking about the two from the Crashing Rainfall sect. The ones that-
Oh, shit. She stored them in her body. Where the fuck are they?
Gods damn it all, fuck. Where are they? The last time she remembers thinking about them-
Her brains. She lost the majority of the Mind in the fight against the fortress. Did she have a brain in charge of tracking them? She can regrow a Mind from a Body with no brain at all, but does that mean she keeps everything from before? Or is it based on her current self, whatever that may be, so she can respond to the current moment?
Fuck. Most of her memories are here, she’s sure of that. Is it that she didn’t really care about them, and the data wasn’t preserved like her priorities and identity?
Priorities. She splits off a new brain to go and deal with that problem, returning to the memory.
No story to them. Not a Domain, just a vignette.
Is this what he meant? Something to do with the depth of their Souls, maybe, or to do with a degree of comprehension? She’s used to Domains as a weapon, or a tool, but this doesn’t feel like that- if anything, it feels more like how she experiences a fully matured Soul.
The third and final member of the group is even stranger than the rest- at least until she identifies what he’s doing. A tall man with pale yellow skin and hints of vitiligo, he has eyes of pure white coloration, and not a single hair on his body. It is instead wrapped around his shoulders like a cloak, and woven into fibrous tendrils that carry him and seem to be ever-shifting into spearpoints and netting.
He’s a Craft user. One who apparently Sacrificed his hair, and seems to have at least partially bound it to a concept.
And all three of them are waiting for her to respond.
She forms a human larynx and a set of lips inside her throat, making a chirping, crackling sound on her first test.
“My name is Raika,” she says. “I come as a traveling companion to… Lord Aurick, here, and we seek only passage.”
“Nonsense, dearies!” the leader of the trio says, her smile only glowing warmer somehow. “Any friend of Aurick’s is a friend of ours, and we’ll be happy to be a stopgap place for ya. I’m sure you’ll only feel better about your journey with a belly of hot food and a bit of fresh news to tide you over. This one would be honored to invite you into her town, so long as you swear an oath on your soul not to kill, cripple, or abuse anyone you meet while within the borders of Singheart.”
Raika turns her sleek, panther-like head over to “Lord Aurick”, chitinous armor-plated moving out of the way of her spawning in a few extra eyes. Never a bad idea to watch the perimeter more closely. “A… reasonable binding.”
“Aurick” smiles at her, his expression as serene as ever. “It is! And a common one, amongst the Many and All. Not nearly as taboo as swearing on one’s soul is in the Republic, I hear, and a good way to ensure that fights don’t go too far.”
“This one does hope to preserve her home,” says the warm cultivator. “My name is Chu Ari, and it’s a pleasure to meet you. I assure you that any in our walls unbound are found by the heart and the trees, and we are more than happy to hold ourselves to the same oath.”
“See? More than reasonable. And Chu Ari is an old friend of mine- I once nursed her grandmother, back when her great-grandmother fell ill. It’s my privilege to remain tied to her bloodline. I swear on my Soul not to kill, cripple, or abuse anyone while within the borders of Singheart.”
There. The words echo into the world, imbued with weight. Just like…
Just like Truespeak.
Raika relaxes her vocal cords, allows them to CHANGE into a deeper, truer shape.
“I swear not to kill, cripple, or abuse anyone in the borders of Singheart without true and deep cause.”
The air between them all goes cold.
Even Aurick looks at her in a moment of shock, the serenity on his face slipping for a moment.
“You…”
The cultivator to the right of Chu Ari, the one who reeks of living honey in darkness, steps forward, his eyes suddenly sharp and wide.
“How… how did you do that?”
—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Every Dao in her inner world strong enough to be a tree bends, pieces of them collected one by one and placed on the altar-anvil. Flesh, Blades, Guns, Flame and Lightning, all arrayed around each other in pieces that make the world tremble. At their center, ingots of Radiant Metal, one exuding heat, another, magnetism, a third, a fluidity abnormal. Surrounding them all, a shell of Blacksteel, dozens of shards thick enough to outsize a human hand, and interspaced with it, masses of flesh and biomorphic constructs formed of her flesh and World.
She feels the world bending inwards to this point. The mass of her Qi, the two Souls she has arrayed to help her, the Dao trees bending and shifting as she experiences them so directly, the paracausal materials at their center.
She could hammer them together. Rely on her Heart to make it for her, maybe. But that would neither diminish the danger nor improve the final product.
She bends everything of herself, of her inner world, to this point.
The monochrome and iridescent radiance of CHANGE falls on the anvil like a pillar from the heavens.
The first strike upon the anvil. The first kiss upon the altar.
Heart, Soul and World bend inwards to form something divine.
—-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A small beetle, currently riding atop a still very confused but very satiated centipede-crocodile spirit beast, turns to face the center of the world, the hilltop at which the sun touches the earth. Its army of writhing, rainbow-hued worms (and more recent converts to its forces) all turn with it, facing into a moment so profound that it resonates down to their very beings.
[SOMETHING BAD IN THE DARK OF THE WOODS] makes a sound that is neither howl, nor bird-cry, nor roar, nor scream, but holds pieces of each and more, and casts the sound into the place where it Is. It’s larger than its previous home, and stranger, disconnected, with far less of the Woods it once called home- but it is rich and bursting with things that [SOMETHING BAD IN THE DARK OF THE WOODS] did not know it hungered for. It feels the world bend and begin to create something new, like a birth, and it raises its voice to the sound of that which was not becoming what is.
The sky above trembles as its stars move, bent inwards to the creation of something impossible. Thunderous rain, spears of lightning, arms of storm and body of starry night all tremble as everything is briefly shifted, as if puzzle pieces clicking into place. The storm intensifies, both in fear of what is to come, confusion at what is, and a celebration of what now comes into the world.
Souls, too small to be real, too vast to be unmade so easily, tremble at the shaking of all that is. A pair of thorny, midnight scales creaks and groans as the weights of punishment and justice are reshaped again and again, as concepts spin. Restful form beneath a sky that is not stirs, nearly waking for a moment, and the remnants of a small crystal, nearly faded within the core of its protector, ring weakly with the sound of creation.
Two strangers, long kept asleep and much disoriented, wake up in a wooden cabin, scrawled with sigils which hurt to look upon, its roof torn asunder as if by a great weapon. They feel the world around them ring at the touch of concept and reality intermingled, and feel a mixture of awe and fear.
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Raika feels something inside of her… click.
The world around her bends away from her, like a sudden wind has blown every tree and mote of air away from her- and then in, as if she has the weight of a moon, dragging space itself in towards the central point of her being.
From out of her being comes a sound that is not sound, and a feeling that does not exist, and a comprehension that burns the minds it touches. Everyone around her, even the Divine Beast she rode in with, take a step back and look at her, for just a moment, with a mixture of confusion, fear, and awe.
“...Sorry. Sometimes I just sort of do things.
“Oh, and… this one used something she has heard called Truespeak. If that… answers your question.”