A Jaded Life

After waking up Adra, it was time to break camp. We discussed switching the spell we used to evade tracking, as I was now awake again, but decided that it might attract suspicion if we did so. Even if the spell Adra used, a spell she called “Pass without trace” just made it harder to track, not impossible, in a way, that might even be better, letting them think that they were able to track us, just to lead them onto the track of a group of dryads.

“There are horns behind us.” Ylva stated, just as we started to leave. I felt myself blanch a little, remembering the sounds of horns, hounding Sigmir and me through the forest, shortly after we met. But both of us had more power now. Hopefully, enough power.

“Can you estimate the distance?” I asked Ylva, just as Sigmir asked for the exact rhythm.

“I don’t quite know. Just that they are far away, at the edge of my hearing, making it hard to make out anything specific. I can’t even tell if there are multiple sources overlapping or just a single source calling them together.”

Ylva’s answer calmed me quite a bit, her hearing was exceptional, informing us that we had a good lead. Now, it came down to keeping it. With that in mind, we started our travel.

During the day, there were more horns, some only audible for Ylva with her exceptional hearing, others were closer, close enough that even those of us without canine hearing heard. Sigmir explained that the signals called for individual hunters and hunting groups out here to take action, to search for intruders. Nothing was signaled about the nature of the intruders or the fact that their chieftain and shaman had been slain, only that intruders were on the land of the Jonari and they had to be caught.

We were pressing on, not stopping or slowing, when suddenly Adra cursed, twisting around and in the same movement readying her bow. Reacting to her movement, Sigmir and I turned as well, searching for the thing that had spooked her. It took me a moment to make out a shadow that did not move in the same way as the trees and the brush around it, but it was far enough away to make the judgement hard, thanks to the amount of foliage between us. By the time I had made it out, Adra had already let an arrow fly. It looked magical, literally so, trailing an arc of azure light, for a split-second connecting her bow with the target, before fading. The target fell over and moments later, we got the message that we had gained EXP. I wanted to run over, checking if there were more enemies, if we had to fight, but Adra stopped me.

“Wait. The concealment is gone and I can’t recast it. At least not for an hour or so. That shot took too much out of me.”

“Well, darn. You say Astral Power is the problem?” I asked, with a sudden, bloody idea. Maybe it could work, but it was an idea worth trying.

“Yes, I’m not that good with that type of magic, so it takes a lot of power to make up for my lack of skill.” she answered.

“Let’s try this. Maybe it works. Can you use the spell and let me power it? Or rather, can you use the power I provide?” As I asked, I was searching for the Blood Amber I had created from the nymphs and the dryad a few days before.

“I don’t know, I never tried anything like that.” She looked a little uncertain.

“What’s the worst that could happen? Let’s do it.” Part of me wanted to bite my tongue as I said the first part. My last two experiments with magic had come far, far too close to killing me. Well, as the adage went, “Third times is the charm.”

Her uncertain look did not lessen, but she started chanting and I used Lernore’s sight to look at the magic behind things. It looked almost as if she was drawing a picture with her words, no gestures or direct control needed, the words worked as a mantra, guiding her power into the formation needed to activate the magic. Looking at her, I saw the power slowly gather from all over her body and drew on the power of the Blood Amber in my hand, using my Blood Magic-Skill to control it and guided it to that gathering point. There was a slight resistance, forcing me to concentrate to keep the flow steady and focused, as if the magic did not quite want to accept the outside influence. In my normal vision, I saw Adra flinch for a moment and scowl afterwards, as if it was uncomfortable, but she never stopped chanting.

The first Blood Amber crumbled after maybe a minute, forcing me to take out another, letting its power flow to her. This one crumbled too, but before I could even try to figure out how to make up the difference with my own power, the spell was completed, the picture flashing with light and settling over us.

“That was not fun. Can we not do that again?” Adra sighed.

“I’m sorry. Why was it not fun? I never had a problem with using Blood Magic to power my spells, as long as it wasn’t my own blood.”

“I can’t really explain it. The feeling of someone else intruding into the spell, into such an intimate place, it feels uncomfortable, violating even. Letting you in was hard enough, not that you gave me much choice, your magic is rather formidable.” she explained, with a wry grin on her face, letting me know that she wasn’t taking offence. We had come quite a way from our initial meeting, when she had looked at me, as if the choice between going with me and getting sacrificed in a blood magic-ritual was a hard one. But travelling for weeks, in a small group, forced you to get to know each other, to see the other’s quirks. That had apparently softened the effect of my antisocial traits, both of the ingame-avatar and of my personality.

“Well, I’m sorry. Maybe we can find some way for you to learn how to harness my magic, or blood magic, to fuel your spells. It would give us another arrow in our quiver, but that’s something for another day.” I told her. It was an interesting concept to ponder,

Now that the spell to cover our tracks was reapplied, we moved over to the corpse and I was truly impressed, her shot had been awesome. Shooting at an concealed target, while moving and without any real time to aim and still felling him with a single shot, a shot that hit him square in the chest, taking out the heart? That was an incredible show of skill. Or maybe luck, a single shot might be attributed to luck.

Before his demise, the shadow had been another Jonari-Hunter, having a horn in his hand and armed with a hand-axe. Sigmir identified him as one of the trappers in her tribe. We decided to leave him as he was, arrow and all, letting him look just look like he was killed by an nymph or dryad-archer. Which was exactly what had happened after all.

Happening upon the hunter raised our vigilance almost to paranoia-levels, but we were lucky and we saw nothing more of he Jonari for the rest of our run, only from time to time hearing their horns in the distance.

That is, we saw nothing more of them, until we got to the gorge we had left Rai in. Now, that was the moment when I got a truly bad feeling in my gut. By the time we got into the vicinity of the gorge, twilight had fallen, giving us enough cover, but the fact that it was now guarded by Jonari-Hunters, two bulky males that Sigmir identified as two of Jongarn’s henchmen did nothing to assuage the feeling in my gut, but changed into an interesting feeling of anticipation, the knowledge that it was likely that we had just found the last prey we had wanted to kill, the one that was the main reason for our attack on their village, almost made me shiver in what I could only call bloodlust. I knew that I wanted to bleed him, that I would love to stab my athame into him and slowly draw out his blood, letting it coalesce into a gem to make a pendant for Sigmir out of. Maybe I would even try to recreate the collar I had placed onto the nymph, the one that had allowed some sort of eldritch horror to swallow her soul and annihilate her mind.

As fast as the last thought came, it was banished just as fast. While it was most likely the most painful way to go, remembering the scream of the nymph, I was not willing to risk my sanity, my soul and the world at large to make him die a maximally painful death. Just the feeling of me ripping out his life with my Blood Magic would have to suffice.

“I will scout them out, I’d rather not attack them head on, that gorge is an excellent defensive position.” I told the others, before drawing on my Darkness Magic to conceal myself.

Remembering what I had done the night before, I tried to duplicate it, but in a slower, controlled fashion, in order to keep my wits about me. With one part of my mind, I focused on the runes for Shadow and Concealment, trying to add their meaning into the magic to help myself along. Soon, I got to a point where I was unable to do more, it felt more like a reflexive resistance of my mind, preventing me from going too far with my magic than a limitation of the magic itself. Last night, my loopy state of mind had probably prevented me from sensing it.

There was a soft hiss when I started moving, and looking at my arms, it was more akin to a strange cloud of darkness, a shadow in the night than it was an arm. It would not let me walk right by the guards and I doubted that I would be able to do the strange shadow step I had used the night before, but with a little magic, I had no doubt that I could sneak my way into the gorge.