Chapter Forty-Six: Serenade

Excitement bubbled in Tom’s chest as he took in Val’s words. He met her smile with a big grin of his own.

“Finally!” he exclaimed. “Some good luck!”

“Some good luck, indeed,” Val said, amused at his joy. “I doubt we would’ve been able to buy one out from under a noble in Wayrest in the single week we get in there, even if we offered them twice the price.

“I’ve never even seen a swarm essence before, but Scriber described the one he found to me. You could’ve spent the rest of your life wandering the Deep and never found one.”

Tom just grinned, running his thumbs over the thousands and thousands of tiny facets, admiring the way the light played off them.

“Well..?” Val said eventually. “Don’t keep us waiting.”

Tom looked up, and saw Val regarding him with amused impatience. Smitten had a big doggy smile, her silky tail wagging as she watched him. Sesame was sitting on his hindquarters with his forepaws folded in his lap, returning excitement back down their bond to him. Scorn was pretending indifference, but Tom thought he caught a hint of interest on the sour tom’s face, even if it was rather aloof.

Tom took a last look at the essence, imprinting it in his memory. Such a rare and valuable thing should be remembered. Then he checked his status one more time for good measure.

Skill Four (Complete): Wings of Grief (Ritual (Familiar)).

Mana cost: Extreme.

Cooldown: Extreme.

Requirements: Thirty life essence, thirty wind essence, five pain essence, one song and one swarm essence.

When summoned: Familiar can make trivial damage physical attacks or trivial damage, short ranged magic attacks. Familiar can sacrifice themselves for a low physical damage attack.

When subsumed: Caster has increased speed, agility, and reflexes. Caster gains slow fall.

Just the swarm essence to go. He raised it to the tattoo on the back of his neck. He had only seen it once, in a mirror at the inn he stayed at on his last night in Wayrest, and he was reminded of thin tussock grass in a wind, stemming from a central point and spraying outwards. He had shown Val once, too, and she said it put her in mind of winter trees, and the way they made a fractured picture of the sky beyond them. Tom agreed, but thought the truth of the matter might lie somewhere in between the two impressions.

The intricate lines of his Wings of Grief tattoo sprung from between his shoulder blades, running up the back of his neck, just peeking around the sides. He clasped the essence to it, and felt it dissolve under his hand. The back of his neck tingled slightly, and he could see a vague pinkish light from the corners of his eyes. It was done.

Tom felt a twinge of vicious glee at the eager, expectant looks from Val and the gang. Then he pulled mana through the skill structure and summoned his newest familiar.

Whenever a familiar was summoned, there was a small pop of displaced air. With Smitten and Scorn, their summonings were audible, sounding like small rocks dropped onto a cobble. With Sesame, it was bigger, and sounded like two bricks getting clacked together.

His new familiar sounded strange when summoned. Multiple, whisper-small puffs of displaced air sounded all around him. At the same time, he felt tiny, almost negligible weights settle all over his head and shoulders.

He looked around, raising one arm, and a pair of tiny birds flitted from his head to perch upon it.

Tom inspected the little birds closely. They were sparrows, or looked close enough to them as made no difference. They had dark grey breasts, almost sooty, and the feathers on their wings were black with deep red edges. Each had a little white mask and speckled bib, with tiny dots of bright pink behind their eyes and at their shoulders. The two on his arm cocked their heads about, inspecting him just as he was inspecting them.

All of a sudden, his bond with them began to ping. If Sesame’s thoughts and feelings were big, slow things, then his new familiar’s were tiny, bright, and excitable.

Good! Hello! Happy! Good! It sent to him, the thoughts rushing over each other like pebbles down a slope. The deluge of impressions was disorienting, and he sank to the ground. Val stepped closer, concerned.

“Tom, are you alright?”

“Never better,” he managed, his head swimming. She frowned at him.

“Just a lot to take in,” he managed, gesturing at the little birds.

With every thought, every feeling, every tiny image they peppered him with, he began to get a feel for them. When Sesame communicated with him via the bond he got an impression, a sense of direction, among many other pieces of information.

There were many of the little birds, and spaced all around him. They appeared to have one collective consciousness, one single intelligence driving all of them, and yet that made the issue worse in some ways. It felt much like the same person was teleporting all around him, alternately whispering to him, then trying to show him a picture, then pulling his attention in a completely different direction once again.

Slowly, he filtered them out, or rather, he began to grow accustomed to them. Enough to send back happy thoughts to it. It? Her? He was unsure exactly why, but the flock of gregarious little birds felt female to him.

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Gradually, Tom felt out all the individual connections, or the multiple connections leading to the same familiar. There were twenty sparrows, arranged all around him, some still perched on him, and others sitting on nearby branches, or bushes.

One was even sitting on Sesame, perched on the big bear’s nose, where he was going cross eyed trying to look at it. Another was circling Val, but had wisely decided not to chance Scorn’s wrath.

Tom took a deep breath, held it, and exhaled slowly.

“Goddess, that’s a lot of information to take in,” he said, a little shakily.

“I can imagine,” Val said, wryly, watching a sparrow turn circles around her. “What are you going to call it?”

Tom frowned. The pesky little birds were still bombarding him with tiny snippets of this and that. Happiness at life. The colour of a choice looking berry. Amazement at Sesame’s gigantic form. Inspiration struck.

“Sere,” he said decisively.

“Sarah?” Val asked, baffled.

“Sere,” Tom confirmed. “Short for Serenade.”

Comprehension dawned on Val’s face. “Oh, suits the wee nuisances, I think.”

Their varied peeping, chirping and trilling was almost constant. Tom found he quite liked it.

Val found a clear patch of ground next to Tom and sat.

“As good a time as any for lunch, don’t you think?”

Tom took the hint and began pulling some dried meat, bread and cheese from his spatial storage. He had taken over carrying most of the mundane necessities for their travels. It didn’t burden him at all, and his storage was nowhere near to full, so it made sense.

His storage was the size of a closet, much bigger than two backpacks. Both of them still carried one anyway, though. Val simply used it for anything she needed at hand right away.

They ate mostly in silence, watched Sere flit and twirl and skim through the air. They flew in explosive starts and janking turns, coupled with long, flat swoops and glides, all interlocking and mesmerising. As if each of the sparrows were dancing to some unheard beat, it seemed if you would just keep watching a little longer, some choreography, just out of reach, would resolve itself.

“What I wouldn’t give for a collective familiar…” Val said, a little breathless. It was the most engrossed Tom had ever seen her, watching the birds dance. She was so enraptured she missed Scorn’s withering glare from two inches away from her face.

Eventually, they finished eating, and readied themselves to move.

“We’ll take it a little slower from here on out,” Val said. “We don’t want to miss any signs of the orcs, and we don’t want to stumble into them either. You’ll need a little time to acclimate to Sere too, I don’t doubt. No point rushing.”

“Sounds good to me.” The waterfall of new information from Sere was growing easier to bear, but he definitely would need time to get a proper handle on it.

“You should sub one of them, too.” Val told him. “That way, if worst comes to worst, you can regenerate any that get killed from it with your mana.”

Tom’s face creased in confusion. “How’s that?” he asked.

“It’s one of the benefits of collectives,” Val said, shrugging. “You don’t have to sub all of them or none. But just like a regular familiar, if it gets damaged, you can heal it slowly while it’s subbed, using your mana. So as long as you have one subbed, you can regenerate lost members of the flock. Pretty much means you can’t kill a collective ‘til you kill the summoner.”

“Wow,” was all Tom could think of to say. It was an incredibly useful thing to know. His estimation of Sere grew yet again. He called one of the sparrows to him, where it disappeared with a tiny pop into his tattoo.

“You’ll get incremental benefits depending on how many are subbed at any given time, unlike the all or nothing from regular familiars, too,” Val supplied. “Or at least, that’s what Scriber told me.”

Tom couldn’t tell any difference in his agility, or speed, or reflexes from having just the one bird subbed. He supposed that made sense, though; he would only be getting one twentieth of the full bonus.

As they continued on, scouting the way for any signs of orcs passing, Tom began to get an appreciation for how useful Sere would be.

As they moved, she spread outwards and ahead, zipping through the canopy, sending information back to Tom as she went.

The momentary impressions were tough to parse, at first, but Tom began to glean more and more from them as the oddity of it grew less and less pronounced.

It was like having an automated scout. Between the twenty sparrows, there was nothing for a good while ahead of them that could pass unnoticed as they approached.

Sere worked perfectly in tandem with Hunter-Gatherer. She could range further ahead than the sense projected, and anything that he did sense within that warranted further attention, he could send her to investigate.

The benefits were numerous, and began to show immediately. Straight away, they picked out a lonely rock golem, idling with some boulders in a small clearing. Val and Tom steered around it, not willing to spend the time or effort fighting it.

Sere sent a warning of a large, emerald snake, sunbathing on a sunny branch, that they would have walked right under. The creature seemed to match the ambient mana levels while sleeping, and was difficult to pick out with Hunter-Gatherer against the branch it was lying on. Scorn decapitated it effortlessly just as it became aware of them encroaching upon its sleep.

And that wasn’t all. Now they knew well in advance of any difficult terrain, and could angle their course around it, instead of hitting it and having to backtrack. Sere also seemed to have a fascination with brightly coloured things, which paid off when she pointed out a patch of weeping heart flowers, useful as a base for all kinds of alchemical products, up in the nook of a branch where some soil had collected.

They were one of many ingredients that Harvey Bubbles, the alchemist from Wayrest, had stressed the importance of. Tom had spent a little time studying the notebook the affable man had given him, and it had been useful in identifying several alchemical ingredients during his time in the Deep. He looked forward to seeing him next.

The weeping hearts weren’t the only things on Harvey’s list he had managed to find. Tom placed them in his spatial storage, among the healthy sized pile of other herbs and treasures. He had been slowly accumulating them, both from his own finds, and the odd thing here and there that Hunter-Gatherer had generated.

“They certainly look nice, don’t they?” Val said to him once he’d climbed down from the tree, a small smile on her face.

“I suppose they are at that,” he said, looking at the pretty white blossoms. “Harvey’s gonna love them!”

Val looked at him like he was an orc, then shook her head and wandered off, muttering under her breath. Tom paid her no mind, her fixation with ‘nice’ things had never gone away, after she had sent him off on that first excursion where he had found the thought-painting frog.

She always refused any of the nice things he found when he tried giving them to her, thinking she might want to stow some useful ingredients or essences away herself, so he stowed them away for Harvey instead. He figured Val just thought he was being too generous, and that he should keep the fruits of this ‘nice’ training for himself.

It was certainly a productive method of finding all sorts of rare herbs and roots and essences, he’d give her that.