One time Tim’s dad cut out an ingrown hair from his bicep while sitting at their dining table. Dad was a doctor with a family practice, so it was safe. The patch surgery Inte performed on a couch he might’ve stolen from the Adams Family felt kinda like that. What he lacked in boxes of food and old clothes on a porch extension, hybrid storage - dining area, he made up for with his own idiosyncratic organization of valuables. And willingness to get the job done wherever and whenever most appropriate over aesthetics and the squirming of a patient in shock.
Add to that lovely memory blistering hot spell bolts to lay the glue that would seal the patches. And Inte’s a bit of a cookie like his dad. When he’s on point and in his element the silent observer sheds his protective covering to exude his character in full. For Inte, he drew oils from his white hair, rustling it into waves of frozen torment while spell fire glistened on his black goggles. The lad taught him a song Tim memorized through three patches across his torso. While singing, Inte applied his spells into the leather soft surface: “Tinderbox surprise,” “alley oop,” and “blink brickhouse.”
At the sealing of the third patch, across Tim’s upper chest, where the fissure of rancid flesh was two inches at its widest, Tim belted the chorus in pain drunk love to the strangers of Olas Bay. Inte’s kin, he explained while Tim bit into a towel soaked in wine and he flattened the patch. Smoothing out like a hot iron across his skin, the medication covered only enough to keep Tim from punching him in the face and saying Hell to the No.
He appreciated what Inte was doing. Dryfu helped translate the story since the song version kept its original. He also advised Tim against casting a Protection spell since he needed the healing to have full reign. His next night’s protection spell would honor him and his kinsmen with a piece of their song.
Tim pictured the two strangers brought together seemingly by chance. His boat. Her house on fire. It was a real catch.
Sup Forn followed the black clouds into the flooded marsh, guiding his small fishing boat with a long umhalp pole enchanted to leave markers he could track and signal for help. He’d heard screams from far enough back that the house fire looked like an eye in the dark of the night.
He’d been on his way to the capital in hope of work but got lost in the ever changing maze of the Glytin River.
Fresh rains meant new paths and old carcasses to unearth. The muddy waters reeked of death and sod, and the closer he coasted toward the widening eye, the noxious gas of its presence. Frogs and fish flopped furiously to flee the fire. Sup Forn pushed his pole through a portion of log wide enough to suction it in and stuck.
A lizard with a golden flare atop its head and back scraped and scurried across the pole. As it closed in, Sup Forn prayed to the god of his ancestors to free his pole before the creature took ownership of his boat. He heard the flame beards poison could paralyze their prey long enough to take a sizable meal for its carnivorous needs. Then it turned the gas on and would cauterize their victims with the beard on its spine. From the view of onlookers, such an upside-down launching ship of hot death might look like a beard trailing down like some ZZ Top kinda lizard.
When Sup Forn realized he couldn’t wait for some god to save him, he snapped a front kick from the lip of his ship. Balancing with the pole still stuck in the tree goo, Sup Forn delivered a shaka to the chin of one raging hemorrhoid of a lizard. Its claws scraped the sole of his boot, but his snap was too much kick for that punk, and he went flying.
Far enough to expose a dip in the river, a delta pointing him toward the fire on a straight shot of clear water well wide enough for his hooptie of a river rager.
Even better, Sup Forn’s full weight on the pole dislodged the log from whatever was in its way. Sup yanked his pole free while the log rolled and buckled under the rush of new water heads. Moonlight glistened in watercolors with the brief blaze that was Funky the Getto Chicken.
Sup Forn rode the river’s new momentum and pushed his pole into the soggy mud, guiding his boat toward a small mass of sticks and river debris. The river pushed him over and onward into thicker smoke.
When he arrived, the small cabin on the isle was now a charred corpse with claws frozen skyward in defeat. On the shore far enough from the smoke to breathe a little air, Sup Forn found a woman lying face down over a rock, not moving. Her skin, once dark as the water, was now pocked and bubbled over in wide, heart breaking swaths of burns.
Sup Forn recognized her from the market at Calessara. It was her stand that had the pack of teens loot the leathers. She’d been kind to him when he’d told her. His bone deformity only showed in a minor tilt of the shoulders and hips, but she didn’t judge that he only told her and wasn’t running after them. She didn’t ask, only thanked him, grabbed a long knife from under her drawer and ran for the door.
Now, she lay near death.
Sup Forn fell to his knees, splashing a little river water and digging into the sand for an unburned place to pick her up. He found one around her armpit and carefully rolled her onto her back.
She stabbed with sudden alertness and a knife–smaller than the last he’d seen, and he was thankful for that. The strike halted when her eyes locked on their memory.
The blade tip poked through his shirt. Her gaze tightened from remorse to suspicion. “Were you with them? Did you send them?”
She rose but only pressed the blade enough to warn of worse.
“No,” he blurted.
And Tim felt the words pass through his voice. His throat. Her knife nicked his stomach.
White tinged with blue and violet light flushed across her face. Composed and smiling as though greeting the sunlight of a new day, she whispered, “Thank you, Priest. Tell my great grandson he’s been called too.”
Before he could ask for what, her features lost their boundaries to the light.
You’ve done well, Timothy.
Oh, how the voice set him at ease. He could sit and listen, free from time or worry.
I have appointed Inte to help. Keep going.
The source of light remained bright even while Tim faded into the background. The dream’s tethers fell away as wanted to ask where.
He woke on Inte’s couch with a mask on his face with slots for his nose and mouth to inhale stale air. Body odor, his own and a sourness of foreign origin blended with the discomfort of an unwieldy length of sore stitches riddled from his face to the last of his scars. Patches covered his whole body, but the greatest stains of his nighttime war was the map of demon scar now healed to tender flesh and tired muscles.
Tim’s sudden awakening choked Inte into a coughing fit as he stumbled from slumber.
He wiped a hand across his face and rolled off the arm of his chair to stand behind it and lean into its strength. His gaze held on Tim in rapt silence.
Tim tried turning. A lance of hot screaming agony seized him from stomach to throat. Wow. He was in for a fun recovery. He swallowed gingerly and spotted a glass on the table.
“Here, I’ll help,” Inte said.
Tim needed every bit to sit up and not drop his glass before he could drink.
He seemed to hold a question fear kept on the tip of his tongue.
“Did it work?” Tim asked.
That wasn’t it. Inte’s disappointment exhaled, followed by. “Your fever broke a few hours ago. The patches are still working.”
Good news, but not what Inte was hoping for, it seemed. Did he know about the vision? How could he? “Did you see God too?” Tim asked.
Hope renewed their warmth in the man’s eyes. Nearly to tears, he steeled his nerves in another breath of forced silence.
Who was this guy, Zechariah? “He said he appointed you to help me, and to keep going.”
Inte smiled. “I had a vision the night before we met. I was told not to mention it until your vision confirmed that I should go with you.”
“She did.”
“How did Sarunyha say it?”
Tim repeated her words about her great grandson being called, too. His face fell and his shoulders shook with an outburst of sobbing, confirming, as Tim could guess, in the affirmative.
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Inte composed himself and levered up on his knees to stand. Eyes wet with tears, he gazed on Tim like a newborn man. A bit of fear, but heaps more in hope and courage to see new surprises of the same ilk as the one Tim heralded.
Inte reached for his belt and a long metal wedge. He took it out and ripped his shirt at the middle buttons, exposing a six-inch scar of white across his gray skin. Surrounding the straight-line scar was a canvas of irritated rash and open sores. His aura emanated suffering so longstanding it hummed with desperation for relief.
Inte grinned. “I’ve been waiting a long time to take this out. Wherever you were, I was waiting and hoping you’d arrive before I perished.” He swallowed and his attention drifted to his flask with the resignation of a battle yet complete. He took a full gulp, screwed the cap and lined the blade with the top of his scar.
Tim thought about saying no, but Inte’s commitment was too admirable to rob of honor due.
Inte released a slight gasp. The tip penetrated to fresh blood. A splash landed on Tim’s face patch. It burned into the mask, activating the Eiyero like a brush fire. XP tingled across Tim’s jaw like a traffic jam of passengers eager to party. Spirit Memory, and Light Burn sparked with the greatest population of capsules ready to burst into levels.
“Would you like me to cast Healing—
Inte shook his head hard. Sweat dripped off his glistening forehead. He steadied his wedge blade over the scar, then pressed the tip into a bead of blood leaking unto more. The dark liquid released an odor rancid enough to shatter glass.
Inte forced his gloved hand inside the pocket of puss. The metal wedge thudded on the hardwood. His eyes bulged. Hand covered to the wrist in sparsely haired, unearthed flesh. Black, purple veins rippled like a tree branch. Whatever was inside had spurned internal healing that fought against this interference. Its job was to purge the invader, not this new threat.
Tim held back healing spells for concern he’d interfere with Inte’s careful work. Swirls of magic whisps fluttered out like threads cut free from whatever they’d bound.
Slowly he retrieved an arrowhead chiseled from abso stone. He extended it to Tim on the palm of his hand. Blood spilled over his palm to patter the table.
Tim quickly analyzed the stone and confirmed it wouldn’t explode anytime soon, he was mostly sure. Abso could hide deep wells of power.
This one contained a gem of aura-soaked blood the size of a fingernail.
“Ja-Seong, the nivelador you need, has been hiding. Waiting for me to choose whom I give the location. Even I don’t know where.
“Gantus lied if he said that he knew where he is. That’s demons for ya, never any ground under their words. Now that you’re here, I don’t feel so much that I’m choosing you as that I must.”
Tim wasn’t so sure. He started to object.
“Your gifts and calling are clear. Even though I took this out before, I’ve never met someone able to read Spirit Memories. That alone is a rare coincidence. Add to that discovering E’Tic’s body and now you’re here.” Inte inched his hand forward. The stone floated in the small pool of blood bordered by the lines in Inte’s palm. Its crimson surface rippled with the power bubbling underneath.
Tim crossed his inner threshold from fear to acceptance. He also had to grant Inte mercy to release his burden. Accepting the arrowhead, a new weight drew Tim from the peculiar interest in Inte’s sucking chest wound, to a cool wind gracing his ears and the tips of his hairs now on end.
Darkness penetrated Inte’s room in the cloak of terrible power held back by particular terms. It allowed Tim to resurface in the dim light of worms spread across the surfaces of a small cave.
Nivelador Ja-Seong rose from his slouch against a worn over stone. Face overcome with hope and wonder, the filth caking his skin almost forgotten in the sight of good news.
Tim’s grip on the arrowhead pressed into the aura of the good nivelador. Hidden in this cave since he gave that blood, waiting for the one who would be sent to free him. His brown eyes peered across the spare few yards between them, testing Tim under the weight of expectation and challenge manifest.
Arachnid bones, many with yards between sockets, some the length of fingers, even to fine details framed the room with an engineer’s calculations and symmetry. A prisoner of another ilk might have collected tens of thousands of scratched off days. Darkness resided in more than the shadows amidst the outskirts of the one set in its center.
“You made it.” Ja-Seong deflated in a little slouching of rest. Then to coughing.
Tim gave him a moment, taking in the writer’s desk molded in masses of bones stuck inside hardened yellow wax to utensils and books made entirely from native materials. Stacks of increasingly less-white parchments were set in a staircase of near to tipping piles. Tucked safely under a long dead beetle’s hollow shell were a weathered collection of oil jars of various colors.
Ja-Seong collected himself, wiping a corner of his mouth to his worn sleeve. Somehow, he’d managed to keep his face beardless. Some might call him less of a man, but Tim was okay with that. Maintaining such handsome features as a full Gandalf beard would be as much or more work than shaving. Though a spider wax beard oil with enchanted constitution bonus sounded optimal prime.
Do you try to shoehorn Transformers references because you think I’ll laugh, or…?
Instead, Tim thought, ignoring the jerk and his jerk reply, and observed the nivelador’s four knives of various means of menace on the shelf nearest the glowworm nest above the desk. If Tim had to guess, their nest borne from the crack in the rock became the centerpiece of building the desk closest to its megatons of light.
I imagine it would be hard to leave a culture so attuned to your brand of cool.
Within its glow, Tim noticed a scar on Ja-Seong’s jaw resembling the arch of a spider’s sac.
Ja-Seong’s smile broke through his cracked skin. “I knew you’d come.”
Did you see that flinch? He thinks you’re ugly.
Ja-Seong turned to the wall, braced a hand on his hip and paused. Age, sacrifice and more than his fair share of the black ore around him mined him near to breaking.
With hand bracing his hip, he lifted a trembling arm and wiped his mottled and flappy robe sleeve across dirt and grime caked surface. As he cleared the glass, a blue ring was revealed a yard deep.
Pilk’s last words seemed to sprout from his soul in increasing fruit, filtering invisibly through his skin and collecting in the coil of blue thorns, as he’d called it. The aura was so strong it simply was, enchanted and encased the transportation ring as alive as a crocs tail.
“Pilk said I must not enter until all the others are complete. Are you coming to me?” Tim asked.
“I only had the strength,” Ja-Seong started to say, then swallowed painfully. “To stay alive. I wish I could have held the Riftlord back until now.”
As though laughing at himself in the mirror, Ja-Seong chuckled and eyes wandered a moment before locking back on Tim and, hopefully, the present. Renewed joy found a fit on his face and
a red-violet fire lit in Ja-Seong’s pupils. Only a puff of vapor before the aura dissipated into brown eyes weary with the expense. His gaze wizened with what he captured. “Oh to have met you in the strength of my youth.”
The coils spun through the icy encasement, burning an amber light along the circle it traced, wider and faster. Closer to Ja-Seong, who turned and embraced the heat on his skin.
Until the coil enveloped him.
A whoosh of power carried Tim backwards into the void.
Leaving distant memories of meeting the nivelador, while he adjusted to the couch and Inte’s snoring from his chair.
The wound had been sealed and spots of brown blood marring a white bandage suggested the bleeding had stopped. Still, a cleaning and new cloth was needed. A dizzy spell slowed Tim on his way over to help. He pressed into the patch on his chest to quell a fire of nerves angry for his incessant movement.
Tim listened for company. Only the snoring verge toward suffocation from his pal, Inte. It stopped, longer than usual in the offbeat symphony, then bubbled out in a choking cough.
Inte’s eyes eased open. “You’re back.” He shook himself awake. Eyes locking on Tim. “Did you meet him? Where is he?”
“I don’t know. He activated an Enclave, or maybe I did. If I see Pilk I’ll ask. Maybe it doesn’t matter. The first part of Pilk’s prophecy, or at least the first Enclave Gate is activated. I just don’t know where it took him. Pilk warned me not to enter.”
“The Farmstead,” Inte said, growling through the effort to rise. Worry soaked his gaze as he searched the room for something.
“What’s wrong?”
Inte kept his train of thought until it spun around to a drawer under the map container. “Eh-Ray !” Inte exclaimed. He snatched a key ring from the drawer and started well toward spinning on his heel. The pain in his chest halted him and wrestled him nearly to the floor. “I’m good. We need to go. The path to the gate is exposed and I haven’t been able to keep up on patrols that far.”
Tim charged Healing Bridge and raised a hand to his friend. “Let’s take a minute, for both of us.”
Tim cast his spell and connected his hand from Inte’s chest to his own, then the cuts on his face. Healing Bridge sparked life in sunbursts and tendrils of heaven, gifted with reach enough to remind him he is not planted too far.
Aura Ward has gained a level! Now Level 2. Aura Ward, Healing Bridge and Enclave Seed have evolved to the spell: Enclave Tree. You can now plant the Enclave Seed to form an Enclave Tree, which is required to establish your Enclave Gate and network. Choose well, for the trunk sustains the tree. Utilizing Light Speed from your Cleanse spell, binding strength and restoration in alignment with Healing Bridge, your Banner will spread far. It will also draw attacks from foes before Pilk took up his leg of the race. The health of your city’s light will spread through the Enclave portals to nourish and enhance the efforts within. Not only will you attract patrons eager for the travel benefits, but you’ll also offer significant advantages to those who choose to open shop or call your Enclave or city home.
The ultimate goal is to complete Pilk’s map of locations, then you can enter the Enclave to Ja-Seong’s Cave. From there you must defeat the Riftlord. If you fail, Hist may use his riftstone to collapse your Enclave network, and the dimensional gate will expand its plague through the vacuum left behind. The Rift to Earth will burst open and his kingdom will conquer without mercy.
Succeed and unforeseen blessings will spread through your lands, yeah! including access to those not seen since the Mist came and pushed Vignyia to its current sea swept borders. Boo, bad Mist.
Are you okay? Do you need a hug? Tim reached to pet Dryfu, but the bastard flew off.
This spell will open a wormhole with access to settings more valuable and rarer the higher you increase its level. Enclaves require tethers to their origin world or the contents within could be lost. Your first Enclave will tether to the train station you have drawn for Squire’s Castle. If the tether is destroyed in the origin realm, everyone inside the enclave will perish. If you have another tether, they will reinforce each other but will also risk a black hole effect if one is open when the destruction of the other tether takes place.
As an Enclave Tree planter, you will be granted +2 to Constitution. Don’t get too excited. You’ll also be one at all times with your tethers. Care for them and the people they transport with your life.
Once Tim realized that was it, he awkwardly patted Inte on the shoulder and said, “I guess I got that going for me.”
“I’m not calling you, Timmy Appleseed,” Inte said. “That was an extraordinary message though. I haven’t seen a whisper text that long since I reached Tier 4 in Patching and was called here. Come on, we better head out. The Farmstead is a hike, and Ja-Seong’s already there.”
Dryfu was half hidden under a pillow, sulking. In a flash he snapped out of it and kicked back to flight. “Let’s go, Timmy!”