In a land of magic and mystery, it takes so much more for things to become legend. A regular magician might find a passing note in a history book if they discover something new, a notable warrior might be celebrated for a lifetime or two after his passing. Yet Rathe did also have legends, tales brought out to scare or comfort children, stories of beings so vast and impossible to imagine that to describe them was to speak in allegory for fear of conjuring their ghosts, the dragons, the aesir, Ophidia, and Fyendal. Other legends were humans that had excelled beyond even their own expectations like the founders of the schools of Misteria, or the warriors of Solana. Other stories tell of forces of nature, of whirlpools and maelstroms at sea, and that most powerful of elemental forces, the Flow.
Not being from Aria, Ichika didn’t know if the Flow was real, she’d heard stories of it, sometimes used to frighten children, ‘don’t complain too much or the Flow will take you’. This mystical force that dominates, isolates and protects Aria from outsiders and shapes its landscape, has according to legend also reached out to people from other places that Aria needed, or that needed to be in Aria and taken them there. There were a few key elements across all children’s tales about the flow, the first, was that the Great Tree Korshem was the first thing outsiders saw in Aria, which proved to adults it was a fake story because no tree could grow that large. The second was that the person had to want/need something to change desperately, their situation, themselves, the past, the future. The important point was that the Flow came and took them away and changed them, and even if they somehow came back they were never the same again. But it wasn’t actually real, come on, those are children’s stories, so people would say someone was ‘Taken by the Flow” if they just disappeared one day from a bad situation, but in reality everyone knew that they had died, or left quickly without telling anyone. Even for a land of magic that was a step too far.
Yet today it became real for her, she had one desire, one singular desire, stronger than she had ever felt before in her life “I need to be anywhere but here”. And then it happened, a flash of multicolored lights, swirls of green, blue and yellow, and she felt herself being pulled through a whirlpool, spinning around and being drawn headfirst through some kind of eddy.
Then as quickly as it started she was lying on her side, winded and confused, but she thought she heard birdsong, and felt sunlight on her face, before she passed out from the dizziness.
The wind on her face woke her gently, the wind had always been her friend, ever since her childhood at the floating dojo atop Skylark peak. You could not train balanced on a mountaintop without becoming friends with the wind. Then her tired brain snapped out of that softer line of thinking into reality.
Last night, the raid on her family’s home, her need to disappear, where was she? Had some mage read her thoughts and teleported her here? Her eyes shot open and she sat up quickly, hand going immediately for the dagger at her waist. Dagger in hand, she kept low, not knowing what dangers might be around. The weapon was cold to the touch and it was an immediate comfort.
She was in a forest, not a light bamboo forest like you’d find back home, but thick with ancient trees, oak, beech and more she did not recognise. You could tell the age, moss and lichen had covered many of the trunks, and the earth had grown and shifted around the trees. She herself was in a small dip in the earth, in the shade of one of the larger oak trees, shielded from too much outside view, but still exposed to the light through the leaves.
She took a moment to stretch, she was stiff from where she had been lying on her side, the straps of her backpack had dug into her shoulder muscles a bit and they were sore. Thankfully she hadn’t been thrown at the ground, just spun really hard and placed there. Checking everything was still in one piece, she felt like it was time to explore.
Peeking her head out of her shallow refuge, she looked around, and saw nothing but more trees, no animals, just some small lazy insects moving around. She did briefly consider the fairy tales about Aria, but this was just a random forest, no great tree, no Korshem, just some weird magic and a mage who maybe lost track of his spell. She would figure it out later, but first she needed to make sure she was safe.
Yet she could tell animals had passed through here not long ago. Misteria was not free of its threats, though many were airborne, so everyone grew up knowing when to spot a potential predator’s tracks.
In the mud outside her protected shelter were hoof prints, quite large, she had seen small deer back home but this one, if it was a deer, would be much larger. Not something you wanted to threaten. There were also smaller paw prints, from maybe some kind of mouse or fox. That was a relief, no larger predators…yet at least.
As she thought this, she looked through a gap in the trees and saw the giant stag drinking from a small stream and it took her breath away. It wasn’t just large, it was huge, almost 2 meters tall and more if you included the antlers. What’s more is that it seemed to have runes and magic etched into its skin that glowed a luminescent green in the fading light of the day, maybe a runestag was a better name for it. It wasn’t alone either, aside from a few more of its kind mostly female and younger stags, there were smaller creatures, little kitsune and mice and some squirrels were sheltering under its legs, one was perched on its horns and looked like it was cleaning them. Were these the dominant animals in this part of the forest? That would be a relief as they looked herbivorous!
She must have been breathing louder than she had thought, because the stag looked up and saw her. It froze, evaluating her with a gaze that seemed more than just animal, that spoke of years of living, surviving and protecting. Yet it did not move to charge her, it just bowed to her, as if to say ‘I see you, I will not harm you if you keep to yourself’. She did the only thing she could think of, and bowed back.
They stared like that for a few moments, then realized she was still holding her dagger, so she moved to put it away. It was then that the stag cocked his head and suddenly started charging straight at her! She leapt backwards, putting her back against the tree, what had she done? Why was this creature coming straight for her? It was so fast as well, she started looking upwards for a branch to grab, but it was coming on so fast. There, she spotted one and leapt for it, the wind giving her a little help. She grabbed and held on, but not high enough or fast enough to pull herself up. Then the stag was on her. She felt its antlers brush close to her legs but then go past her, and she heard a meaty thud as the stag collided with something out of sight below her.
She pulled herself up onto the branch, and turned around to take stock. Lying on the ground was a giant wolf-like creature, its fur was pure white, which was odd for a forest creature. It was just lying there dazed from where the stag had kicked it. However, had underestimated how much it had staggered its foe and as it backed off to ready a charge with its antlers the wolf managed to get to its feet.
As it did, some latent magic in the creature pulled all of the leaves and plants around it together and they began to surround and cover every part of its white fur in a whirling patina of forest. Ichika gasped at that, so it wasn’t really a white wolf, more of a Faunawolf, it had the perfect camouflage and it had been sneaking up on her. Yet somehow the stag had seen it and come to protect her.
Unfortunately the gasp was the wrong move, the wolf looked up and saw her now, lying flat as she was against the branch, not high enough off of the ground to avoid a creature of that size. It bared its teeth, and looked hungrily at her.
But it had not forgotten the stag, so it began to move erratically now, not giving the stag a chance to line up a charge, but moving a few paces closer to the other beast every time. The stag was definitely getting nervous and looked prepared to run away. She could see the rest of its small herd through the trees looking this way, but seemingly unaware of the danger. They could help but she couldn’t summon them, and the air around the glade they were in seemed to be quieter, almost muffled. Was the faunawolf somehow affecting the sound as well? No time to think about that now.
Yet Ichika knew she couldn’t fight the faunawolf alone, not now, not without help, so she made a decision. She was a trained ninja after all, if she could somehow help the stag to win this fight they would both be safer. Plus, it had already taken a risk in helping her, so she couldn’t leave it to fight for her alone.
She stood up on the branch and quickly took inventory, two daggers, her pack which had some supplies and clothes in – nothing special – no poison or anything that might slow the creature. She had some wire for making tripwire traps, and some other tools that required preparation that were useless now. She did have her shuriken, that was likely the best place to start, see if she could distract and maybe slow the animal by aiming for its legs. After all, she just needed to give the stag an opening to put his huge, and probably magic, antlers to work.
Thankfully, she didn’t have to go onto the ground, in a forest this dense there were other branches she could quickly reach. She plotted a course through them that would take her towards the wolf, and she leapt. The wind again gathered under her feet making her jumps longer, and guiding her to safer footing than she would have found herself.
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Soon she was close enough to where the faunawolf and the runestag were facing off. The faunawolf had gotten dangerously close to the runestag, and was one good leap away from ending this fight. But the runestag was acting defensively now, and every time the faunawolf shifted it found itself facing nothing but antler. The antler’s also seemed to glow as the runes pulsed with some sort of energy, seeming to grow even pointer and sharper projecting even outside their bone frame.
Not to be outmatched magically, it seemed the faunawolf earned its name as a predator. As Ichika jumped onto the last branch she needed she looked away for a second, and when she landed she saw there were seemingly two faunawolves now pacing around the runestag.
Yet from her vantage point Ichika could see it was a clever trick, but not one without gaps. From above there were gaps in the swirls and you could see white patches of fur in one of the swirling clouds of plants and leaves, but not in the other – a decoy!
The stag was confused and distressed though and started backing away, but it had already been backed into somewhat of a corner. She knew she had to act quickly, she linked up her shot, threw her shuriken straight at where the faunawolves back legs should be and… and nothing, the beast didn’t even notice, as the whirling leaves knocked her mundane shuriken away and into a nearby tree trunk.
She frowned, but did not fret, as the wolves closed in further on the solitary stag. She did have a few more tricks up her sleeve. It was true that as a child she had been fostered at the Floating Dojo, as part of a learning exchange, it was common for children from different schools and villages to be sent at a young age to study with the masters at other schools to learn the basics of that craft and bring it back. The idea was that it would broaden your horizons and give you new ideas for innovating at your own school.
That was exactly what Ichika had done! But the Floating Dojo was not her home, and her family did not fight with the wind and sword. Most of her school fought with hammers, with spears, axes – heavy weapons for heavy people – but because of her fosterage she was the only one who used Shuriken. That had earned her a nickname, the Silversteel Shuriken of the Rustling Loam Dojo.
Someone looking on might have found this odd to see, but in the middle of this conflict, Ichika pulled some incense powder out of a small bag on her waist, pulled a match and lit it, and then scattered the smoldering incense to the wind muttering a request for aid from whatever spirits of earth lived in this place. Then she took a moment to gather her energy, lined up her shot, and threw again, three shuriken this time not just one, and prayed to her ancestors this worked. After all, this wasn’t her land, she had no connection to it, it wasn’t the ground where her people had bled and died, it was just somewhere… But the earth was strong here and even as she called she knew it would answer, and it came in a rush. Her shuriken slowed down slightly in the air, just for a split second, not enough to let anything doge, and as they did dirt and rubble collected around them turning them into much larger weapons than they had been before.
Though this process did take a small bit more time, that is why she had thrown three. The first was gathering loosely packed dirt around itself, it went for the target and sprayed grit and gravel in its eyes. The second gathered more rock, and grew heavier and slower, always landing a second after the first, it went towards a vital point or the lungs, aiming to wind, slow and immobilize. The third was the slowest, again only by a fraction of a second, but somehow it always found metal, even here in the forest, it spun fragments of metal out of the ground, copper, iron, gold whatever was nearby. It then took those elements and made itself thin, thin and strong and sharp.
She had been forbidden from using this full combo in training matches in the dojo after her masters had seen what it did to the practice dummy. This was because the third shuriken always went towards a vital spot, aiming for a kill. This was not a technique she used to disable.
She watched them fly and the earth magic began to swirl around them and was shocked, it responded even more than it did back home. At home her school and clan appeased the spirits of the land with ritual, festival and ceremony and had for thousands of years, so they were very amenable and almost tame. Here the spirits were helpful but they were wild, they took her vision, her new addition to their lives and they sang for joy for its novelty and for her offering, and because of that they made it work even more than it ever had back home.
Her dust-shuriken became a miniature sandstorm that mixed with the whirling leaves and filled the plant-leaf bubble around the faunawolf with grit and dust. The second shuriken didn’t just look like it was made of stone, it looked heavy and she could almost feel the air it displaced as it went “thwop, thwop, thwop” and then a howl of pain as something went crunch inside the leaf-bubble.
Her third shuriken changed the most, it wasn’t just sharp metal anymore, instead there was a glow to it, the same kind of green-gold glow on the runestag’s antlers was now suffusing her shuriken, and she thought she could see runes or lines forming in the metal.
It went into the leaf-bubble and she heard a sickening slice, and then the bubble disappeared, and the air went still again. The sounds of the forest rushed back in, she hadn’t realised before but the faunawolf had been doing something to the air. That was how the leaves could swirl around it and it maintained its stealth, blocking out the noise with some sort of air magic.
But it was definitely dead now, even the stag could smell the blood in the air. It looked at her warily now as she dropped down from the tree, and walked towards the corpse. Her shuriken had neatly sliced its head off, and to her surprise, they lay their intact on the ground. Normally two things happened with this attack, firstly the magic often warped the shuriken, making them unsuitable to throw again, and secondly the third shuriken that spun itself anew from metal always shattered after it hit. It was a one-use transformation of the weapon, not something that it could survive, but now it somehow had.
The first two shuriken were back to normal, the dirt and stone they had acquired had crumbled away, but lying in front of her on the ground, intact and wholly changed was a large metal shuriken made of some strong gray metal that had allowed it to survive the impact, and decorated with gold and silver. It was also magical, etched throughout the blade were lines of the same glowing green magic she had seen on the runestag.
She wondered why this had happened? She wondered if it was maybe a welcoming gift from the spirits, to thank her for her offering, but she didn’t have time to think about it now. The runestag came closer, and as it drew near she knew what to do. She stowed the new shuriken in her pack, and made sure her weapons were all away and then bowed to the creature.
It stared at her again, looked at the faunawolf and bowed back. Then it moved closer and kneeled down, inviting her to climb on.
After the adrenaline of the day, and the last few moments, she was more than happy to oblige and climbed onto the runestags back, using its antlers as hand holds.
Then the runestag rose, went back to the glade and called its herd to it. Ichika soon ended up sharing the runestags back with a little fox, that reminded her of a fennekin from back home, and the antler cleaning mouse she had seen before.
It was already getting quite late, and dark was coming but the herd seemed determined to move on, and Ichika soon found out why. From the way they had come, she heard howling, and snarling, these stealthy, silent, wolves were displaying their anger, they wanted their prey to know they were coming and to herd them into a better position for the kill. A few times the herd was forced to change direction to continue moving as far away from the wolves as possible.
The herd couldn’t rush though, the difference in size across all the animals – and she could see there were badgers and foxes, and weasels and more here now too – was too great.
But they couldn’t keep running forever, so as the night deepened, they made their way through the forest until they reached a cave, with a small opening, and into this they went. The little animals scampering to the back, and the tired runestag taking up his position at the entrance. It was a good location, the wolves couldn’t surround him here, so this would be a good place to make a stand.
Yet the howls weren’t super close, though they were still coming, so she clambered down, ate some dried supplies from her backpack, and prepared her things for the fight that was sure to come in the morning. It was a shame she couldn’t prepare more, but her rudimentary traps would be no good against animals that strong. She knew one of the schools in Misteria, was it the Hidden Claws, specialized in traps, but that wasn’t her.
She took out her new weapon, sturdier than she had imagined, yet also with enough flex to be thrown hard without snapping, and thought that it might even up the odds, the green runes along the blades pulsed as she ran her finger over them, tingling her skin with the magic within. She thought again then for a moment about where she might be, she didn’t think she was in Aria, that was a fairytale, and after all every story agreed when you came to Aria you woke up at the foot of The Great Tree, Korshem, that was the gateway between ‘normal’ and the fairy tale, every story agreed. Still Aria was famous for more than one big tree, every story also said that it was a place of untamed elemental power, and what she had seen earlier was definitely that. Still she wouldn’t find answers tonight, she needed to survive first, and find people to ask questions of later.
So, as she always did before she slept, she made a quick offering to the local spirits, said a prayer to the statues of her ancestors that she always had in a pocket at her waist, and tried to fall asleep. It did take a while for the adrenaline of the day to fade, and she started to feel herself remembering what had forced her to flee, why she had wanted to leave so desperately. Yet, even grief would not stop her exhausted body from getting the rest it needed, so she began to drift off.
And just as she was about to fall asleep, just out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of the animals do something strange. Strange enough to note but not strange enough to wake up for. One of the little foxes that had been running around, swirled a little bit, and then she could almost swear its fur disappeared and it was just leaves, and then the leaves disappeared and blew out of the cave, but even for whatever weird place she had ended up that was a stretch, animals didn’t just blow away on the wind. Nonsense, so she slept.
And so it was that Ichika, the Silvesteel Shuriken of the Rustling Loam dojo, was taken by the Flow, had come to Aria, and found herself at the beginning of a journey that would change both her, and the land she had discovered forever. But for now she slept, and was hunted, but that was a problem for the next day.