Tim let the paste continue to work its magic on his face despite the incessant itch the healing produced. He could squint through the pain to surgically insert his dagger into the apple pie droppings preserving E’Tic’s aura.
While he worked on that, Lank and Kari pruned unusable branches and collected dry wood.
Utilizing Ward and Map Maker with his Spirit Memories allowed him to piece together a map from E’Tic’s travels. In all, they captured him as a primary cog in the Padstoligan Rebels mission to stop the cartel and artisans from what felt, at the time of his death, to be a losing cause. Their fight was likely years past redemption—once the CWAD wiped out opposing nivelador elite and started rogue leveling, the regression from war to massacre overcame them in a landslide.
Tim mourned the loss of family, his father many decades ago for selling aura enhanced sailing masts, and more than Tim could endure remembering as though they were his own father and friends. United at first to honor a wealthy man cut down for helping an aura crafter, then grinded away in a David meets Goliath war against aurinx genocide.
Not long ago, Tim’s primary responsibilities were survival, taxes, and managing entry for a few hundred people a day.
Now, he was meeting sons of historic martyrs while the war was still raging. Boot camp didn’t last long and already he had thousands of souls lost in this fight, their memories as sharply torn as if they’d all fallen on him in the last week.
Catching his breath, he took a parchment from his supply and drew a map from E’Tic’s dungeon and above ground travels.
While the CWAD operation mined around silo 19’s borderlands, freely gathering enough to equip their Northern Wave war chest, E’Tic and his band of Padstoligan Rebels scattered wealth and information like squirrels burying nuts. Over time, they worked toward clever and evasive means to overcome, however minutely, the great numerical odds against them.
War wasn’t just about wealth, though it sure bought many and greater opportunities for victory.
Start with uniting the magic-friendly industries such as Eiyero, military and civilian arms as well as infrastructure and trade, then add in investments from other aurinx hating leaders and organizations and you drive down demand for anyone and anything related to advancing aura gifted—not aurinx as they deride folks like Tim so casually.
Not that Tim was riled up or anything.
He didn’t need Lank to tell him which branches to slice free.
The memories came and went without order, introduction or contextual framework. If E’Tic were on the last number of a password, the memory might cut out without a hint to help closure. Not that they used passwords, that he’d seen. It was more timing their movement with the feeding and sleeping habits of the demon and ricken, as well as less threatening dungeon creatures.
E’Tic was killed only a few months ago.
Née’s face flashed into memory, the two sets of red eyes fixed his gaze on Tim as if he knew Tim were watching.
His six horned head splashed inward into the ether, replaced by the grove and E’Tic’s Venom saturated corpse. Analyze searched the pits of decomposition for clues. A porous continent of black eroded E’Tic’s right hip into a moonrock of doom left by the demon rider’s spell.
“Can I have that?” Chris asked, pointing his staff at the evidence of foul play. “I could crush it into dust to fertilize the saplings.”
Tim considered it. The dormant trees were good to split between lumber and the fruit of its roots, and stronger sap would help with his Princess Pearl plan.
Tim’s focus locked back on the decay stretched a hand’s width over porous, shriveled, and gnarled bone. E’Tic had broken his hip while fleeing. Tim felt the snapped rubber band of excruciating pain shooting down his leg when E’Tic’s bone tore his quadriceps. Aura burned and produced a flash in the pan vision of an eagle with oil black tail feathers six feet wide, with bright red rainbows acting like smug eyes squinting from safety as it flew away.
The demon rider was a messenger just like the red-eye, black feathered phoenix from his vision.
Aside from what that was all about, why would someone so powerful bother with a scavenger like E’Tic?
The minerals he and his network recovered weren’t significant enough to merit the cartel or artisans from uprooting their little hovels on the wrong side of the borderlands for their comfort. Yet maybe E’Tic was planning something or had done something significant enough to force their hand and send Nee like an assassin. Tim sucked on the Spirit Memories, trying to guide them through his will to reveal the answers to his questions.
Venom saturated the bone in concentration so sweet it panged Tim’s teeth. He gasped and cupped his hand to his mouth to catch the drool.
“I’m sorry,” Tim said. “I need it for the memories. It has clues about the demon rider who killed him. Maybe something we can use that was big enough of a threat to force them to pick off one more rebel. When we catch him, you can have first pick of the loot.”
“Man of his word,” Chris said and entwined pinkies with Tim as real men do. Pinky strength is fierce str—
Are you done? I’ve been trying to hail you, oh omnipresent one.
I uh, what?
No!
Tim set his hand on the hip to brace for standing—he’d been so tired, and it had only been natural… now he couldn’t pull it back.
The mottled flecks of black shifted across the bone, closer to his gloves–Tim was sure glad to have those. Tadpole-like shadows swarmed for a little leather appetizer, don’t mind if they do.
Tim cast Protection and charged Light Burn.
If this were my trap and I didn’t want someone with my sense and abilities to manipulate my spell, I might use the last of my strength to attack. By chance, killing my foe. Forcing them to react rashly in self-defense to eradicate the real treasure.
A wisp of tunneled wind shot Dryfu in a Torpedoed gust of vibrant green and brown waves, spiraling at Tim’s hand.
Tim let go of Light Burn and braced for the Torpedo.
Dryfu spiked Tim between the knuckles. Sharp edges lanced through his veins, lifting the black flecks off his torn gloves. Embers of Venom drifted off to dust. Memories lost and well earned to the newest foe to cross his path.
Tim ripped his hand free, tearing his glove in an outline of scorched soft leather and bone.
Chris raised his staff over a spell-cradling palm. “You good?”
The bone was soft and fresh with the burn of the spell’s reaction. “Shoot me a vine. It’s time to hunt.”
Chris launched Vine from a slit in his wrist. The arched shot timed Tim’s Magic Hunt cast and jolting of his hand back at the bone.
An eruption of aura fangs speared through Tim’s hand.
He kept Vine and Magic Hunt on full throttle.
“Your catchphrases still suck,” Chris gritted out.
“Man, I’m used to getting paid by the hour. My clip-on was an expectation of the lack of wit. I could just grunt.”
Tim did, and Chris joined. Pain attached to his face like acid, his clenched jaw the iron that would not give. At the hip’s heart, his vine thickness expanded and spawned new threads, each darting out with a predator’s eye to thread the needle in the nearest crater.
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Tim brought the Oil to the kitchen, like he had with Warryn, pouring his gift into the host’s aura channels like batter in the pan. The tier was high and its bottoms low, but Tim had long roots and reserves that kept serving.
Cycling his breaths allowed him power to pass through the pain in the present to a dark vision. Gusts of cool wind broke against his face as he soared through dim tunnels scanned by a demon’s eyes. Née’s night vision and incredible swimming strength pushed him on a relentless line at full speed through a narrow tunnel. Critters, rocks and a sponge coated bank of wall muffled the whir of Nee’s flushing pass over.
Née’s soul tore itself over in anger at E’Tic’s grove tapping into his river. The spell fragments Née sent through it were being absorbed by E’Tic’s trees, weakening the concentration downriver where his spell slowly burned in waiting. The algae and minerals in the water worked with his Bomb spell components to camouflage themselves in the fish and amphibians that ate them. Rerouting an underground river that close to Gorin’s aqueduct would draw too much suspicion and effort. Easier to kill the tree farmer and wait until his spell concentration reached a level he could live with before setting it off.
Tim’s presence stretched through a crack, escaping Nee and opened up in E’Tic, who was leaving home for another trip back to the grove.
“Sleep with knives, wake up cut,” his wife said on his way out.
They’d had many arguments over his trips to the dungeon and risk to keep his grove flourishing, but they always cooled when their food was low and his daughter was fighting the rash again.
By Tim’s vantage in Née’s and E’Tic’s memories, he threaded a loose narrative of why E’Tic was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
His Spirit panged with regret for the lack of worship in such a statement. Always the right place at the right time; by faith, we walk.
And what living stone can refuse the polish that makes them beautiful, even through the pain?
His priestly calling met this spiritual warfare as visions of demons flying by night, claws barely hidden at their sides, hunted the abandoned mining tunnels for the grove keeper. They sensed Tim’s presence in the now—and he theirs—through this activation of his pure aura flashing sparks off the whips of Venom and this spell come to life.
Tim parted the blades of defense to read of why Née planned to assassinate the moon golem, Gorin Three-Knot. Taking the veilspells warded into the three knots of hair on his chin would grant Nee’s escape from Hist’s curse that kept him underground, trapped by an invisible tether to the Dimensional Heart Hist wielded like heroin over all those tainted with its power. Those who were malformed by too much dimensional gas in their blood, or other life flowing source.
Like all demons he knew, one remembers their beginning, or at least the beginning of memory; and his has always been under Padstoligan, hunting miners and the sort who are sometimes better employed than fed upon.
Née was ready for a different taste of strength. Breaking free from Hist would give him endless opportunity to ride and feed. Even if he slaughtered every airborn or land-dwelling creature on Vignyia, he knew of Gatekeepers who hid the ways to other dimensions. He could hunt them until their secrets presented the buffet.
Each golem knot represented the wellspring of power accumulated in a secret storehouse of veilscrolls crafted by their ancestors. Nee would feast on their wealth and fury in defeat, then redirect its power at his cursed Master.
To keep their scrolls safe, they conscripted veil-transfer to permanently affix the spell’s equivalent to the Knot wearer. In this plan, the golems turned their treasure into a weapon.
They should have left it buried. Née could transfer that power without the popular vote of Three-Knot’s tribes because he took them against the golem’s will.
Once the veil parts the mind of the new knot wearer, evolving and making room for habitation and becoming a suitable channel for funneling its power long term, well, as comes the veil, so too, its company.
Née was willing to endure the burden of veil-transfer.
He longed for that co-existence within the veil, both for its new power source and as a way of escape. Demons could feed on the veil beings more easily than those of flesh and bone, as well as earn greater aura restoration in their consumption.
Tim’s Oil nature understood that assimilation of foreign aura, as well as the hunger for it. Some tastes, and effects, could not be replaced.
Tim wove his way into a memory of how Née pictured the assassination to go. With water as a natural weakness for moon golems because of how it can erode their exoskeletons, Née planted particles for his Bomb spell in the aqueduct beside Gorin’s property. Née required a gradual increase in the accumulation of his enchanted silt to prevent attraction by the golem’s inherent ability to sniff it out. The algae growing in the water created a smell that could make a biohazard taste tester wet his bed.
Née found Gorin’s personal responsibility to the clan and willing suffering of this occupational hazard a sign of weakness. Not that Née needed justification for killing him and most of the clan in the ensuing flood. He could reason Gorin was simply one more foolish golem with more power than they deserved.
The tribe chief was also responsible for bringing them, occupying this territory specifically for the water. Their veilstones work best with water and live specimen of an algae that only grows in dungeons exposed to dimensional gas.
Gorin Three-Knot was the strongest of the Golem Chief Trinity, and Née wanted not only his knots, but his head. A prophecy of his jeweler said their end could come from a pull of all three. Née believed that fire etched message on the Lord’s viewer called him to take them down through the one with three knots to pull in one stroke.
That’s enough. Dryfu flicked Tim hard enough on the tip of his nose to make him sneeze violently.
Cool, rigid strength struck over his cheekbones and rushed through his eyes in a soothing salve washing the shores free of his cursed visions.
“Something wrong?” Tim asked.
The vine tugged as it grew through his wounded palm. Well, partially wounded, partially healed by Chris’s Vine. He looked away from the way it slithered past opened skin, massaging muscles out of its way and numbing nerves. It tingled like a sciatica wave of bitter numbness. Its healing fed into the burns that scorched Tim’s hand with black puss filled boils. The return to their fireside torture drew Tim’s face into a scowl.
“You were getting too hot,” Dryfu said. “The Venom is fighting back hard. Your skin was glowing.” His face flushed as though glad for it. “I’m glad to see you can resist, and you might have helped your aura sickness. Still, the demons will smell the gloryburn on your skin. If any are within a few miles, it’ll be too late. We’ve opened the grove, and the odor of its fermented fruit; now it carries the scent of a priest on the barby.”
Tim snorted. “Clever.”
“None of my colloquialisms translate as well as Seinfeld quotes with you,” Dryfu said.
“Ain’t that the truth,” Chris grit through clenched teeth. His storm swept eyes locked on the vine’s entry at E’Tic’s hip. The vines entered the soil underneath and drew up gulps of something turning Chris’s skin gray. His hand holding the vine trembled. Sparks kicked off the orb on his staff, torched black where they met the crystal, and cooling in sunburst color as they flitted away.
“Are you drawing something from the ground?” Tim asked. Whatever it was did not favor Chris any longer. “Stop.”
Chris coughed. Blackish water spilled over his lips, his eyelids, and his ears, dribbling and then pouring onto the dirt. Steam hissed where it flushed over the tree roots, eroding over the wood with the evaporative power of acid.
The vine’s tone darkened into a forest green turning into brown. Splits oozed black oil the same color as that dribbling off his brother’s chin. Tim slashed his dagger at Chris’s wrist, severing the vine with only an inch of healthy green to retract into his wrist’s fleshy eye.
“Thanks,” Chris said and threw up onto the trunk. Splatter hissed across the bark and E’Tic’s skull before Tim scooped it clear.
When he did, a hole showed up under the man’s body, between it and the trunk. It looked burrowed with a smoothed over surface from frequent use than caused by the spells of demons.
Then memories awoke of E’Tic training his haklas to create holes large enough for people.
Nee didn’t know about this.
The memories didn’t reach that direction to share where the tunnel led or what E’Tic had planned to do with it.
“Look what I found,” Chris said, collapsing on the trunk with a front row seat below.
Tim’s MP was down to a healing cast left before he’d have to cool down for awhile. No more Spirit Memory pulls in his near future. The Venom had fought back, draining a large chunk to steal what he did.
He put E’Tic’s skull in his bag of holding and cast Healing on his brother. “Love and well wishes, little bro.”
On the top lip of the entrance roof, a small sail was carved into the wood with ‘Cah’ branded into the center. That was E’Tic’s surname, and the logo used on their sails, which shone only as the enchantment released its aura.
Beneath the sail, a short phrase was carved in longhand in the Padstoligan dialect.
Before Tim could translate, Lank rested a hand on Tim’s shoulder to gain his attention. Gently enough to avoid crushing Tim’s muscles to goo. Sweat glistened on his cheeks in Tim’s healing light and his eyes bore the weight of a long road ahead. “You good to seal that door?” The request exposed weakness and opportunity to show himself a friend.
His spell would continue to work within his brother, and for the most part, had rescued him from the poison’s teeth before it was too late. Tim nodded.
He cast Protection on the newly sealed passage, hoping the stacked element and Murphy’s calculated and yet whimsical stomping would block their scent from drawing demons and the like to his gloryburn. In his Protection spell, he wrote a poem of the Cah family and their sacrifice to the aura blessed. This graveyard would become a bastion in their fight.
Chris created a garden hedge in a caste wall style about ten feet to each side of an open doorway leading to the trunk tunnel. One of his vines ran along the upper lip near the carving. Tim had let the phrases: Orev Valley, Edke Camps, and Basarcagrot River wiggle around in his mind while he worked at the entry, but by the time he walked into the hedge doorway, he still hadn’t figured out why E’Tic had written that under the Cah sail.
On his way down toward the click and popping of a fire, he noticed the markings on either side of the phrase, like arrows.
“I figured it out,” Murphy said. “One of the memories is from E’Tic on a trail with those markers, yet they’re in the wrong order, and the arrow at the top should point right once you put Edke Camps in that slot, then Orev Valley at the bottom.
“Anyway, that’s how I’d write it if it were top to bottom like on the trail post,” Murphy finished.