— Blessed Death Root Alraune —
Even with her emotions churning it was surprisingly easy for the alraune to lose herself in the flow of mana.
Most of the plants she could communicate with through the root and mycelium networks spoke of the rapid approach of winter. They spoke as always more in concepts than words as they projected the idea that those who were not already in the process of discarding their leaves were preparing to do so.
The alraune was not entirely sure but she thought she tilted her mostly formed head as she projected as little of her confusion as she thought would get her point across to the plants. She also wondered if any of the plants had any concept of confusion.
Mostly the closest plants aside from the sections of death mana infused plants, were mostly grass. In the aluane’s experience, grass almost never expressed curiosity. Usually the emotions they sent out were a muted annoyance when something blocked their sunlight or impeded their growth. Occasionally when their roots were in danger they could send out some fear.
The bushes on the other hand were more scarce but they tended to have a relatively diverse range of emotional reactions. The few trees in range were often even more complex, at least the older ones were, but their reactions were so slow.
The alraune was therefore not especially surprised that the response she received came from the bushes.
They sent the concepts of mana before showing roots storing resources until they could be used. Finally they showed that energy flowing through the plants as new leaves budded.
The alraune was even more certain she nodded her even more fully formed head as she realized the meaning of both messages. The plants were settling down to wait out the cold season so while they would accept her infusions of mana, they couldn’t really do anything with it until the cold season ended.
Communicating with fungi was always a bit trickier but from what she could tell through the mycelium network they were likewise eager for the energy even if they could not yet use it.
The alraune felt her lips twitch up in a smile as a complex mix of mostly pleasant emotions along with a dash of impatience bubbled up in her.
She was briefly distracted from those thoughts by the fact she had lips now. Oh she had a tongue too. Teeth were still a work in progress as was her left cheek but she almost had a complete mouth. Now if she just connected it to the air sacs in her torso she could speak.
She pulled her mind back to the task at hand with a reminder that needed more than a simple hollow vine connecting the air sacs to her mouth before she could speak intelligibly.
While the parts of her mind focused on building her body continued their tasks she returned most of her focus to carefully threading mana into the nearest grass.
The first attempt was a complete failure. The thin roots grayed and crumbled into a fine powder leaving thin channels in the dirt. Fortunately the scale of her failure was small enough it didn’t take too long to calm the now worried grass enough to make another attempt.
The second attempt went better, but only because the alraune immediately cut the attempt short before much permanent harm could be caused.
The alraune had thought that maybe the cause of the first failure was the amount of mana concentrated in one point, so she instead sent the barest trickle into a number of points along the root. Almost as soon as her mana touched the root it began to turn gray and brittle.
Already half expecting that result, the alraune was able to pull back before the roots suffered more damage.
The alraune knew that incorporating death mana into living plants wouldn’t be easy so she simply let out a little sigh, which was apparently something she could do now, and decided to try one more time before her body was completely formed.
She focused on the plants that were already infused in death mana instead of the grass. She was pretty sure it wasn’t the case from examining her own mana but she thought maybe death mana moved differently through an organism.
She thought maybe she was onto something when she saw most of the death aspected mana created in the leaves was pooling in certain areas of the plants. Closer examination revealed that those areas were seeds and the accompanying components.
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While it was odd for those plants to be seeding when all the rest were preserving energy, but she suspected her guardian may have had a hand in that so she didn’t focus on it much. The rest of the mana flowed through the plant before being released into the air and ground in the same way the life and nature mana flowed through the other plants.
If the mana acted the same then was it something inherent in the structure of the other plants. It wasn’t like those plants and fungi apparently only contained death mana. There were threads of blood, bone, soul, earth, water, as well as some other aspects to dilute for her to identify.
Aside from the presence of more esoteric aspects of the mana the biggest difference seemed to be a complete lack of nature or life mana flowing through them.
The alraune was suddenly swamped with a complex mixture of mostly negative emotions directed at herself.
She’d even thought about the negative reaction that occurred within her when she tried to incorporate both death and life mana into her form. She’d gotten so focused on the need to gently infuse the mana instead of of the interaction between opposing elements.
She made sure her hands were completely formed first, then gently clapped. She’d decided to try one more time and she had a new theory to test.
Before reaching for her own mana the resolute alraune reached out to the incompatible mana in one of the grass roots. As gently as she could she pulled the mana up the root. She wanted to disperse the mana into the soil but moving the mana was already a difficult task even for an alraune. Actually discharging it in a way it wouldn’t just flow back in would be exponentially harder.
She felt a bit like she was trying to hold sand in place with roots as she split her focus between keeping the grass’s mana away from the cleared area and reaching into her own mana pool.
After a few false starts she finally pushed a thin tendril of mana into the root which readily absorbed it.
Instead of becoming a dull gray and crumbling away the already pale root became almost pearlescent white.
The excited alraune was so thrilled with success she let her control of the grass’s and as it flowed back and came in contact with the death mana the point of contact crumbled away, neatly severing the root.
The disappointment of that was far stronger than any feeling she’d had as seed but it was dwarfed by her excitement of her earlier success and the fact she could tell she was only a few minutes at most from being completely finished forming her body.
— Keira —
As Keir and Marsaili made their way back down to the transit hub, Keir could mostly ignore the lingering effects of her failed communication with Mortis.
It became much less easy to ignore after they went their separate ways from there. Marsaili taking a transport to deal with some errands and Keir heading to the temple of Syliantha to meet up with Antheia.
With only idle concerns about things she couldn’t do anything about it was hard to ignore the lingering ache of her joints and muscles. She was also pretty sure that if her body was still capable of such a thing her pulse would still be either too fast or unnaturally calm depending on whether she tapped into her mental training.
She felt like she’d spent the day in a savage melee instead of mostly just walking around the city with a new friend doing errands.
Once she got out onto the street she was a little distracted from her discomfort by the sight of the many temples from ground level. As she’d expected, seeing them from street level was very different but not much if at all less impressive.
Having seen the streets from above Keir was not surprised that despite the large footprints of the temples devoted to greater or at least more locally worshiped deities the streets were not much more simply laid out than the almost maze-like streets of the rest of the city. If anything the wide variety of building sizes made simple grid layouts even more impossible.
She was, therefore, not especially surprised that despite the directions that Marsaili gave her before they went their separate ways Keir got off track several times and had to backtrack, or in one case deliberately circumvent a specific temple. Keir wasn’t entirely sure but she suspected it had taken her at least twice as long as it should have, but eventually she reached the glyph covered temple of Syliantha.
Typically she might have been more impressed by the masterpiece of architecture and arcane magic before her but discomfort and annoyance had a way of dulling wonder and she was feeling a rather a lot of both at the moment.
She did at least pause to take a moment to use her meditation techniques to ground herself. She would need to interact with the clergy to find Antheia and there was no excuse for taking out her negative feelings on them.
Fortunately discomfort and annoyance were fairly easy to push aside compared to some of the feelings the techniques were intended to deal with so after only a few breaths she pushed open the large magewood door and stepped into the temple.
As she did, she nearly missed a step. Perhaps to an architect or even more so a mage the exterior would be at least its match but to Keir the interior of the space was far more impressive.
She knew the temple was equal parts place of worship, library, and academy so she’d expected a relatively small entryway that might branch off to the relevant areas. She absolutely wasn’t expecting a vast library that could have easily contained the royal palaces of some countries she’d traveled through.
Unlike the temple of Lunith, Keir had occasionally had a reason to visit temples of Syliantha so she at least knew the basic procedures to request access to the library itself. She just hoped that would carry over to accessing wherever Antheia was.