The Last Daughter -- Dragon-Blooded Sorcery School Quest

You let Deiza go ahead. She seems confident at first, raising her free hand as if to cast something else. She comes up short, though, glancing down at the surf pounding rhythmically at the base of the cliffs, far below. "... Skin of Bronze would not be a good idea," she decides, a little self consciously.

"It would not," you agree. Metal skin is all well and good, until you need to be able to climb, or swim. The spell infers no ability to breathe underwater.

Deiza turns to glare at you, but only jerks back in surprise as a small, glowing figure flits down into view.

It's a tiny winged woman garbed in autumnal leaves, her features startlingly like L'nessa's, this close. "Accept message," you say, slightly relieved.

Her expression beatific, the messenger begins to speak for your ears only, L'nessa's frantic voice completely at odds with the tiny woman's bearing: "Ambraea! Please be alright! I should be able to see and hear you, but I won't be able to reply right away."

"Neither of us were hurt," you say, during the pause she's left for you to reply.

"What is it saying?" Deiza asks.

"That L'nessa can see and hear me, but can't respond," you say.

Deiza seems vaguely offended by this. "I know what an Infallible Messenger is!"

L'nessa's voice has already started again before Deiza can finish: "Just try to get back to the place we lowered the plant down — I know that's near where most of them are, but we have a plan, I think!" The messenger spins itself out of existence in a flash of sweet-smelling Wood Essence.

"They have a plan," you say, the words not sounding any less cryptic than when she'd said them.

"What is the plan, exactly?" Deiza asks.

"She wants us to go in the direction we were already heading in. One moment." You take in a deep breath, tasting the foreign Earth Essence of your pact with Perfection.

"One moment what?" Deiza's eyes narrow, but she recognises that you're casting something quickly enough not to interfere. She still jumps a little when your foot comes down once, twice, three times near a cleft in the stone in front of you.

"Of that," you say, watching the many serpentine bodies boil up out of the stone. "Guard," you instruct them. If bronze snakes could salute, they would have, instead fanning out ahead of you, necessitating Deiza to step quickly aside.

"They'll have heard that!" she says, turning back to face the upward sloping ledge, accompanied by your serpents.

"The help is worth it," you say, voice tight.

To Deiza's credit, she acts quickly enough when the first of the chimeras comes to investigate you, dark and ungainly against the background fog: She hurls her flying guillotine, sending the weapon spinning through the air, where it catches the ungainly form in mid-flight. Too many legs scrabble uselessly as the chain winds around the creature's mid-section, tightening through its own impossible momentum until the monster has been sheared in two. The chain is dripping red when it flies back into Deiza's hand. You suppose the school will just have to consider this as one of those situations where killing the guardian beasts is 'necessary'.

Then there are five more wheeling toward you, beaks screaming and full of teeth. Deiza manages to take another one in mid-flight, but she's not fast enough for all of them — a chimera rakes its claws at her face, before it's set upon by three of your serpents. It carries them down over the side of the cliff with it, their venom already petrifying its distorted flesh.

The monster that comes for you is the size of a large dog — it's not prepared for you to lunge forward to meet it, your sabre cutting deep into its flank. It lashes out at you, but you harden your skin against its claws. There's a nails-on-stone shriek as it shreds your sleeve, but it doesn't do much to your flesh before you can open its throat.

Up ahead of you, Deiza is using her flying guillotine as a whip to fend off the last of the chimeras. She's not as good with it, used like that, you notice. Calmly, you lunge over her shoulder and stab her attacker. It falls to the ledge in front of Deiza, and is immediately finished off by your serpents.

"You're the one who wanted to go first," you're not quite able to keep yourself from saying.

Deiza glares at you, outlined in anima the colour of yellowed ivory, phantasmal spirals of bismuth crystal blooming and dying in the air around her, glittering in the same metallic colours as her hair. "Yes! Thank you for the reminder!" she snaps.

In Deiza's defence, this time the irritability is substantially pain. Her injuries aren't serious for an Exalt and an Earth Aspect, but she's not as durable as you, and those clews hurt. You try to bear that in mind, to swallow your indignation in the name of practicality once again. To stay calm and poised and dignified as a lady should. Instead, you hear yourself saying: "You're wrong about her."

Deiza blinks at you. "About who?"

"About Erona Maia!"

Deiza lets out a small, ragged laugh, which only makes your blood boil more. "Are you fucking kidding?"

"No! Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about!" You step closer into her personal space, Verdigris coiled low on your shoulder, her surviving sisters looking on with polished bronze eyes.

"Does it matter right now?" Deiza asks. She's seemingly in disbelief of this entire conversation.

You ignore the question, ploughing on. "Maia is not just some... social climber trying to climb into bed with me! She's a loyal friend who I trust with my life! And I don't just see her as some kind of conquest!"

Deiza musses a hand through her own hair, unknowingly smearing blood in it, muttering something probably-unpleasant in Flametongue. "Do you think I actually give a fuck about your relationship drama? Fuck her or don't or profess your undying love for each other, for all I care! You pissed me off, I just said what I knew would get to you!"

That takes you by surprise enough that you can only stare. "You—"

"It didn't mean anything! It was just words." Deiza whirls away from you, picking up her pace as she clambers up to a higher ledge — it's fortunately not that difficult a climb.

You're trying to decide exactly what to say to that, when you arrive near to your destination. Below, the shattered flower pot lies on its side against the rocks, the sapling utterly torn to pieces by the chimeras. So you make yourself focus back onto more practical matters. "We checked the rune," you say, "how is it doing the opposite of what it's supposed to?"

"At a guess, Peleps might have done something to the chimeras," Deiza says. "Sometimes it's easier to take off the hinges than it is to pick a lock."

"I'm sure I wouldn't know," you say, trying to reclaim at least a bit of your dignity. She has a point, though, although it's more something for you to consider later. Some of the chimeras are already looking up toward you, a hungry gleam in their eye. They can almost certainly smell Deiza's blood already.

The largest part of the flock flies up from the lower cliffs and you tighten your grip on your sword, preparing for a far more desperate fight than before. It's at this point that something up above catches your attention, and you begin to understand the rough shape of L'nessa's plan:

Amiti drifts down toward your ledge, an Arctic wind carrying her gently through what should have been a leg-breaking drop. One hand clasps her soulsteel pendant over her heart, staring with wide eyes at the oncoming flock of chimerical beasts that have begun to take notice of her, her free hand flashing through strangely modified Heptagram mudras. Sickly green light crackles out from the pendant — it filters through her fingers to combine eerily with the pallid blue of her anima, already beginning to wreath her body in clinging wisps of freezing vapour. Just as the monsters converge on her, there's a torturous, ear-splitting scream. You're confused for a moment; it's obviously Amiti's voice, but her mouth is closed.

As an orb of pale light begins to expand out from Amiti's hand, you only belatedly realise that the screaming is coming from her pendant. The first monsters caught up in the expanding orb scream as well, briefly, as numerous tiny, white shapes swarm their bodies. Those a little farther away scream a little longer. The smarter or luckier of the creatures manage to peel away entirely.

Amiti lands gently on the ledge, amid the sad, grizzly remains of the chimeras. In the end, you suppose, she hadn't exactly been lying about having found a good spell for cleaning bones. Even as you and Deiza approach her though, and she flashes you a relieved smile, she's not done — she's casting again:

The pendant's screaming intensifies, and a trickle of red drips out of the fist clenched around the pendant. Black lightning spills out of her free hand, striking the monstrous carcasses all around her feet. They stir to lurching, hideous pseudo-life in time to hurl themselves bodily at their still-living fellows, who are just now back around for another attack. Your remaining bronze serpents — save for Verdigris — help them as best they can. It would be morbidly fascinating to watch, under other circumstances.

"There, that's some breathing room!" Amiti says, sounding a little drained while she undoes the rope she'd had tied to her belt — the other end is back up at the top of the cliffs, and presumably it's how you're going to get back up. She takes in both your and Deiza's appearance, noting the minor injuries. "Are you alright?"

"Fucking marry me," Deiza says, grinning at the necromantic carnage that Amiti has set loose in front of you.

Amiti, if anything, looks even more alarmed by this than she had by the monsters. "No!" she says, after a fractional delay. Then, ignoring the rope and the lengthy climb it represents, she leaps nearly straight up, carried by the same wind she'd come down on, landing on a ledge overhead, and then jumping again to the top of the cliff. You can see L'nessa and Darting Fish looking down anxiously at you.

Laughing, Deiza grabs hold of the rope, and begins to quickly climb it, feet braced against the rock wall. You sheathe your sabre and follow suit. Arrows and bolts of water streak past you, presumably L'nessa and Darting Fish doing their best to make sure that none of the chimeras follows you up.

Still, though, you have to jerk your head hard to the side as a chimera braves the gauntlet to snap at your neck — it hisses its displeasure as Verdigris snaps at it, lurching back in the air enough for Deiza's chain to strike it full in its ugly face.

"We're even!" She shouts down at you. Which you don't dispute under the circumstances, even though you're not really even — you saved her twice down there, after all.

You slam your boot into the head of the next one, and L'nessa manages to put an arrow very neatly through its heart.

Finally, you haul yourself up onto the clifftop, where Deiza has already let herself collapse. "That," L'nessa says, "was absurd." She looks deeply relieved to have you safely back here.

"You have my most sincere apologies!" Darting Fish says, half panicked. "This wasn't meant to be dangerous!"

"Tell that to Nalri," Deiza says, still not getting up.

You begin to stand, but freeze as a shadow falls over you. Looking up, you see the glittering coils of a very large elemental hanging in the air. "I see you didn't need my help after all," they tell you, voice very dry.

"Yes, well-spotted," you agree. You would have expected them to be annoyed with you, having just dropped everything to come back to the island for no reason.

Deiza shoots up to a sitting position, scrambling backwards with wide eyes. Amiti, in the process of offering you a hand up, merely freezes up at the sight of the dragon like a cold, glowing rabbit. L'nessa and Darting Fish's reactions are a little less dramatic, but it takes L'nessa a moment to master herself enough to be polite.

"I am grateful for your concern for my roommate," she says, inclining her head politely, as if to a peer. "You are Diamond-Cut Perfection, I assume?"

"Correct," Perfection says, lowering themself down onto the cliffside. "It is lovely to see you again, Lady L'nessa." The ground shudders a little beneath their weight. They lean their head in closer, one reptilian eye examining you, as if checking for injuries. "Why were you down there in the first place?"

"Well, we weren't taking a walk!" Deiza says, getting up to dust herself off properly.

Fortunately for her, the deep, rumbling scoff she gets in return is at least as amused as it is haughty. "Weren't you? It was hard to tell, from a distance."

"I hope you were not troubled unduly," you say, getting to your feet.

"Bargains go both ways," they say, cryptically. "I hope you don't mind, though — when I get back to that conversation I just put on hold, I will have to tell them that I arrived in time to be useful. They may be annoyed otherwise." When you raise your eyebrows at this, all they'll say is: "Sea gods are as bad as water elementals, sometimes."

Even with Perfection's departure, a sort of stunned silence descends on the group, eventually broken by L'nessa briskly forcing some basic medical attention onto Deiza. In the end, Darting Fish's experiment is obviously ruined, at least for now — he'll try again another time, once he can be certain of what exactly it was Peleps Nalri did.

The chances of actually finding proof of wrongdoing on her part that the school will accept are not good — you may need to take action into your own hands, at some point in the future. She's still got another two years left even after this one.

As for you and Simendor Deiza... some tension was resolved, however strangely. Even if you still aren't, and may never be, friends. Some of her actions are a puzzle, but not every puzzle needs to be solved.

The thing that plays on your mind the most, coming out of all of this, is at once the most difficult and most mundane problem brought to light in your brief ordeal: You are going to need to have a serious talk with Maia.

Article:

Emotional honesty and openness are not always easy for you. You're going to need to talk to Maia somehow, though. How do you approach the subject?

[ ] Explain to Maia what exactly Deiza said to make you try and hit her, and try to explain why it upset you

[ ] Tell Maia a story about the first time you kissed a girl, and hopefully lead things around from there

[ ] Try to tell Maia how you felt when she smiled at you after the fight with the mercury ants