My peaceful flight didn’t last long. While earthbound predators couldn’t catch me, there were a lot of very dangerous aerial monsters around. Flying too high risked catching the attention of the bigger and more powerful beasts, leviathan shapes with wings that surged above me in the dense clouds.
Obviously I avoided those, but staying low kept bringing me into the territory of annoying local small fries that ruled surprisingly well delineated areas along my path. I was attacked by several kinds of bird, a cockatrice, three pegasi, and somehow, a shark that swam through air.
Luckily, between Mornax and Zagan I was safe as houses. Mornax, which normally required my feet to be on the ground, received an unexpected benefit from Sammael, which was that since angels were winged and the air was their natural environment, my new form allowed me to pull strength from the sky as well as the ground, granting me access to my defensive form in flight.
As I circled around the marshes though, I realized I was approaching some kind of natural barrier. To one side of the marshland there was a truly colossal spire of mountain, one of the steepest I’d ever seen. Landing and accessing Dantalion to scope it out revealed that a staggering amount of air based predators were nesting on that thing, and the higher up you went the scarier they became.
Because of this, I had to land and make my way on foot, choosing to enter the marshes at the intersection of the two territories. It was odd, the mountain was made of some sort of crystalline rock that warped Perception, so I hadn’t picked it up until I got closer, but once I noticed it I had trouble NOT looking at it.
The nearer I got, the more entranced I became, and it wasn’t until I flared Zagan that I realized there was a trace of corruptive power being woven into the visible spectrum by the light coming through the cliff.
After that point, I tried to avoid direct eye contact, and when I finally reached the intersecting strip of land between the two that I wanted to use to advance deeper into the marshland, I made sure to set my back to the mountain as firmly as possible. It helped me avoid the most immediate effects, but looking close I could still see hypnotic patterns on the ground, and I had to do my best to ignore them.
The strip of land between the marsh and mountain was surprisingly pleasant when I reached it. A wide aisle of grassy meadow untouched by trees or swamp, the flowers dotted over the dark grass were beautiful and calming. Naturally, my danger sense started screaming at me the second I looked at them.
Closing my eyes, I triggered Dantalion again, shaken by the overwhelming tide of information. I’d improved at parsing it, but Sammael boosted the form enormously, and it had taken me a while to get the trick of not just dialing down the intensity, but focusing it.
Rhythm of the Wild was a component part of the Dantalion form, and focused exclusively on plantlife. It was made for finding valuable herbs, but it had other uses too. It could help me analyze the composition of a plant, and combined with Dantalion’s other divinatory abilities could even help me uncover the history of these flowers.
So I focused, I breathed, and I fell into my senses, letting my consciousness plummet into the unknown depths of the flowers. At first it was overwhelming. This kind of hyper focus turned up Dantalion quite a bit, and mixed with Sammael’s boost it was almost too much. Still, I made myself stick it out, and as I got deeper, I understood more about what the flowers were and why.
Dantalion was an odd form. It deduced things that should probably be impossible to figure out by accessing levels of reality that most Skills couldn’t touch, compiling information from sources that might be unique to me, at least in combination.
One of those sources, Eye of Revelation, could let me peer into my soul, or with the permission and help of another Ascendant, into the soul of another, helping identify the stat makeup of the Skills they used. In this particular instance, it let me study the stats that made up the flowers, a veritable blueprint of their functions, and added in brief sparks of insight as to why they were like that.
These flowers had been growing here for about a thousand years. They were actually relatively young in terms of the flora in this place, and they had developed as a natural defense by this strip of land.
Though the marshland was highly poisonous, the meadow here was shockingly free of dangerous chemicals. As such the flowers that used to grow here were a favorite snack of the animals that nested in the lower levels of the cliff. Over time, the exposure to the psychedelic light that shone through the cliff face had altered the composition of the flowers, giving them their own hypnotic aspects, and creating a visual display that lulled unsuspecting creatures into a sense of complacency to be picked off.
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Over time, the knowledge of the dangerous flowers permeated, and recursion began to alter their nature, making them not just reflective of the distortion, but actively dangerous in their own right. The plants had developed a rudimentary consciousness (more of a hivemind than any sapience), and their roots had become laced with paralytics and psychedelics.
If a being came into the meadow and let down their guard, the flowers would entice them to lie down, and then the roots would grow into the flesh of the creature, permeating their nervous system and growing into their brain stems, essentially turning the animal into a puppet.
After being enslaved, they would be pulled under the ground to live inside the root system, lying in wait for anyone who might stumble into the meadow who was too strong to hypnotize. At which point every one of the root zombies would rise up and tear them apart. The zombies weren’t strong, but they WERE numerous.
Lucky for me, I had a perfect counter for this. Leaving Sammael active, I dropped Mornax and, with a grimace, Zagan. My new base form was able to resist the Path corruption outside the marsh, but Zagan was much better at it. That wasn’t important though, I didn’t have long to handle this. Reaching into myself, I tapped into my mask, pulling forth my most recent domain. Wrath.
To my surprise, the domain ran into some resistance as it tried to unfold, converting the dirt was easy, but the roots were a living creature, and they disrupted the conversion. I only had to push my attention down a bit to burrow beneath them though, and the massive sea of dirt was freely shifted into corrosive, annihilating ash.
There was a scream from in front of me and the flowers writhed, almost looking like they were dancing, I pushed the lake of burning ash up, consuming them from below, and the last sight of them I glimpsed was the dark ash swallowing up the stems as the dancing multicolored buds sank below the surface. When I released the domain, the lake returned to being a sea of normal dirt, though I suspected plants would grow much more easily in that area for a while.
I was about ready to move on, following the land strip, when my Danger Sense screamed at me again. I triggered Mornax on reflex, along with Mephistopheles, and I spun on my heel, throwing a fist at whatever was approaching.
A massive tanned fist smashed against mine, and the explosion of black flame combined with the sturdiness of my form shoved the enemy back, but his hand was completely unscathed from the punch. Flying backwards, he flipped twice in the air, dragging his hands across the ground as he went end over end, and came up in an animalistic crouch, grinning toothily at me.
“It’s you,” he growled triumphantly. “I was hoping to run into you. You looked like the most fun to throw down with.”
The huge tanned guy with the wild brown hair bared his teeth at me. I recognized him as one of the other winners from Mourne Kayze, he’d made an impression. “Nice of you to say,” I rumbled. “But I have shit to do, so if you could go nip at someone else’s heels, I’d really appreciate it.”
I had zero inclination to be nice to this guy. He’d attacked me out of nowhere just to see how strong I was. It wasn’t a killing offense or anything, but I was comfortable just labeling him a huge dick and treating him as such. I was pretty sure I knew what he was too, the gold wolf eyes kind of gave it away.
Sure enough, his not grin became a definite snarl as he processed my words. “Was that a dog joke?”
“Whose a smart meathead? You are! Yes you are!” I cooed at him in my best ‘pet voice’.
He glared at me hotly for a second, then closed his eyes, taking a deep breath and cracking his neck. “I’m going to butcher you,” he said matter of factly. “And pick my teeth with your bones.”
“Fair enough,” I replied cheerfully. “Just do me a favor and don’t bury them after? It ruins the lawn. Although, I don’t think I’m really down to play your little game.” I pretended to think about it for a second, then I snapped my fingers. “Oh, I know, how about we play something else. You should be real familiar with this one.” With a mighty flap, my wings cracked the air as I channeled my Waltz through my flight, vanishing in a burst of black flame and appearing about a hundred feet up, a mile or two away. “FETCH!”
He snarled, bolting after me, and I had just enough time to flap again, vanishing in another burst, before I noticed the horde of razor beaked (not a euphemism) sparrows came peeling out of the trees, followed closely by a massive buzzard that took off from a low nest on the cliff. Cursing, I beat my wings again, building up speed as I escaped from the monsters.
The sparrows streaked after me, so fast they almost caught up before my next flap, and I cursed, kicking my movements into high gear to try to escape. Wolf guy was trying to catch up, but a few of the sparrows pulled off to surround him. He started snatching them from the air, but I lost sight of him as I vanished further along the path.
Despite the speed I was moving at, I wasn’t able to shake the sparrows, and they kept getting closer. Snarling in annoyance, I dropped Mephistopheles, triggering Zagan, and then, closing my eyes tightly, I whirled in mid air and shot downwards at an angle, gliding out of the meadow and into the marsh before diving into the bubbling grey muck of the swamp.
I hissed internally as the poisonous water started to corrode my hard stone shell, but Zagan purified it as it touched me, never letting the corrosion get past the superficial level. Instead of dying of horrible poison, I mostly just felt like I had a bad sunburn that was being slapped all over my body.
Swimming through the marsh, I picked a direction, using Dantalion to feel out the situation to try to escape from the birds. When I finally got away, I picked the nearest landmass and climbed up onto it, groaning as I flopped out onto the marsh grass, letting Zagan finish purifying the last of the burning muck. Then I sat up, opening my eyes…and coming face to face with a collection of tiny, shark like humanoids with beady black eyes wearing wooden armor and holding tiny, sharp spears. Shit. Guess I’d found the locals.