To Shield the World (Warhammer High Elf Mage Quest)

Turn 2 Results


-VIII 8, 1, 33-

You return to the clearing where you had found the Hydroid. Lingering wrongness still lurks in the air, in the grass, the dirt and the trees. An unhealthy pallor colors the leaves of the thick forest that surrounds, like someone has taken bleach to them; and they are dry, fragile things, crumbling apart as you rustle past them, or falling to the ground. The grass is twisted, like tufts of spiky, hard things rising out of the earth among pools of boggish brackish mud, though everywhere you look healthier life is seeking to reclaim the ground. Rather than the dusting of sunflowers, golden Aenarions, and manflower that should be so near the forest black and purple roses rise up with vicious sharp thorns.

Walking to the ground and to splattered blood of the abomination you stick your hand into it even as you can hear so many, too many in fact, of your fellow mages calling it disgusting. Sure enough there is the tell-tale tingle of Dhar against your skin, and a flash of cold anger fills you as it does. The real thing then, not merely the work of fumbling, unskilled "wizards" among humanity and Fimir and Dawi Zharr but true and honest Dhar. You snort like an angry horse, and catch the scent of it on the wind, the hair in your nostrils burning as the unclean touches it.

And then you draw inwards. Allow magic to fill you, suffuse you, shaping Ghur in a dance you have danced many times before and will dance many times again, as familiar at this point as your own kin—-more, perhaps, if you are to be honest. Feel muscles thicken and limbs lengthen even as adroit and balanced limbs become thick and stumpish. Feel the hair of your head shorten even as that of the rest of your body lengthens, becomes thicker and bristlier, soft and fur. Your nails lengthen into sharp, hard claws that can smash through armor like so much air. Pointed ears soften and round and grow fluffy and much more sensitive.

And where once stood an elf, now you stand a bear. A mighty grizzly, thick with muscle and fat and hunger, and that is exactly what you were counting on. Your senses were already sharp enough that you could have found the source but now, you will find the source, even as bestial instinct roils underneath, desiring food and warmth in the Frost season. Well, you can get that first one anyway. Letting the new scents pour into you as though magic, you catch the tell-tale bog-life scent of Dhar to the west, heading towards the mountains; the musk of White Lions (the animal, not the Phoenix King's guards) to the east deeper into the vast forests, and to the west as well something…ashy? No wait, lightning? Birds?

Taking one last look to ensure the spell is all well you trundle off into the woods, well sure you can face anything that desires to threaten you. First…first, lunch.

---

Stomach full of berries picked from the vine and juicy and succulent as anything else, you trundle along the forest roads, towards the piquant combination of scents you caught in the forest. The smell of smoke and ash and fire, the stink of Dhar, of birds. Crystal clear streams flow past you, sometimes clogged with brackish Dhar life and you make sure to remember but it seems purity, in truth, is greater than corruption. Vast, ancient trees, towering like knives jammed into the fruit-flesh of the earth by ancient deities in times long past, erupt from rich soil black as night. This deep into the forest you have, by rights, entered what is the commons. Vines studded with an array of flowers of every color dangle low and the frantic song of life erupts from every glade and every clearing and every tree itself.

Sometimes it is a duet, the mournful, dulcet tones of prey flowing in and out like the salmon in a river in the triumphant, living cry of some hunter who gets to live another day. Sometimes it is the raging, hungering, horrified call of predators who have let their prey get away and risk death even as the frenetic cry of that prey celebrates its victory with chiming, mocking song. It is the chorus of bees working in pure harmony within their nests, notes of fear coming and going as you walk past and they note your smell on the breeze, trail long abandoned, only to leave the creatures in peace. It is the mother bird pushing her children to fly from their nests and their discomfited cries as they are forced to part. A pack of wolves howling as they teach their children to hunt and taste the blood of rabbits, only to stop as they catch you in the air. The march of ants gathering food from the environs around them, ever alert for some predator, and making sure to stay far, far away from the bear they notice.

It is Ghur. It is life. It is not always beautiful; but there is beauty to it. And it is always honest.

All this time the scent has grown thicker, that tri-quad-penta-(at some point you lost count) woven mist growing as thick as the trees that rustle in the wind. You are close, there is another clearing ahead of you, one that melds into the mountain, not quite where trees can no longer close but they are stunted things compared to the vast spears that surround you at all times. Then you catch a scent you are much, much too familiar with:

Druchii.

You burst in roaring and rearing, throwing your body this way and that, ready to charge into the melee, unafraid of whatever might desire to attack you, only to find two pale corpses with long black hair, clad in black and gold armor. Empty vials surround them, as do the bodies of dead Hydroids. You growl to catch them, but you growl even more when you realize exactly what heraldry has been burned onto their breast plates:

Blackfang. You have found the source for certain, though whether they will be back—and how they arrived in the first place are bigger questions.

Your form shifts to that of Elf once again as the spell finally runs through its natural course, and so you can feel it once more: magic in truth, not simply the leavings that echo from it onto the lesser, material world but its true form, the object that casts shadow into the cave.

And then you are forced to snap that sense shut like your eyes as you see Qhaysh, thick and radiant and rich and bright pouring out of a cleave in the mountain slopes. Every Wind pours from it but it is thickest with Aqshy and Azyr (oh irony of ironies) acting as a stable base for whatever presence makes its home there. The entrance to the cave, though, is not simply unworked stone and if you were not Vardanis you may be shocked so to see it: a vast door of iron, reinforced with bands of oak and studded with jewels. Scorch marks say that something has tried to enter it, and that something has failed spectacularly. Two statues of elves stand before the door.

The one to the left is clad in Imperial dignity, a crown of white light lightning resting upon His masked face, the mask itself split into two parts, black and white. A robe of black stone studded with diamonds and carved so well you could mistake it for soft sea-silk rests upon his form, dangling low to His pointed shoes. In His right hand He holds a celestial staff of purest, white gold tipped with a comet made of blackest obsidian and damascened with clouds of silver. In His left He holds a silver bow with fiery golden arrows: falling stars.

The right figure is more familiar, more usual, and more plainly Him. In His right hand, a fire of pure white erupts, lighting the world. Upon His left, a phoenix, trilling and fire wreathed. No "mere" phoenix that, either, but a true Arcane Phoenix, and a creature large enough to grasp you in its claws as you might grab some infant cub looks like no more a mere hunting falcon upon the Creator's wrist. He bears a simple robe, if astonishingly well-made in both senses: aye it is carved so well that it seems to flutter in the air formed out of the cave and yet also it would seem to be warm and soft and light and to endure forever after, even unto the breaking of the world. He wears a mask split into both white and black.

Asuryan.

He is Asuryan.

Immediately you fall to your knees as you realize you have trespassed on sacred ground, pressing your fists into the dirt and touching your forehead to the ground as the very mantle of the sun presses down on you, as you hear lightning and the call of a phoenix and the roar of a dragon in the distance. A presence rustles in your soul, and the sun overhead burns even brighter for a moment. And then it passes, and you are left…shaking.

You fall to the ground, breathing hard. And then slowly, ever so slowly, you once again begin to peel open your second sight. Taken slowly and carefully your eyes still tear to see such magic, but it is of beauty rather than pain now, as the magic flows freely without fear, a prismatic, warming array as the creator of the world takes the enemy's tools from them.

Aqshy twirls with Ghyran in fractal displays of brilliance, going on into infinity in tight robes of green and red that spin around each other in a net of protection and light and life, all passions that make life worth offering courage to allow soothing things that make life livable. At the same time it makes a tile mosaic with Hysh that devours the Dhar someone has dared to taint the sacred place with, breaking it and shunting it further along to the Vortex, forged in the shape of Asuryan's Rune. Like red and gray scales upon the body a dragon, a mighty sheathe of Ulgu and Aqshy protect the door, your mind filled with images of the Diamond Throne. Shyish and Aqshy, forged into a sword: accepting doom, and marching onward with courage in spite of it, of what evil fate may bring.

You lack the vocabulary to describe what is being done with Azyr…mostly.

Except where it interlaces with Ghur.

There, you know it as you know your own hands:

It is the bird carried upon the swell of the skies.

It is the dawning comprehension of your most antediluvian forebears as lightning raked the earth.

It is the mournful call of a dragon—

That…that was not your thought.

---

VIII 12, 1, 33

Riddles, riddles, and more riddles. Your ancestors built this thing to endure and protect, and protect and endure it has. Scars from Druchii attempting to enter the place are burned into the mountain itself, rock seared black as your earliest attempts at potion making. And yet the door itself has suffered not an ounce of damage in spite of the savage, blunt and artless efforts of Hekarti's get, useless as ever, useless beyond useless. Raw power and petulance would not leave them in good stead against a god.

For your part, you need training. Not necessarily to get through the door, but to survive whatever is within. It stings to be inadequate; but you can accept it, if only because you have the tools to change that. The tools and the will and the ability.

And so with that you head off, head back home, to begin working on your performance for the Phoenix King. You have had an idea, inspired by your poking and prodding around this place, one that an artist such as Aethis should well respect himself.

---

VIII 17, 4, 40

Outside, thunder and lightning fall and break the earth, smashing apart mud and blasting apart trees and shaking the streets of Tor Achare as some child shakes a toy given him by his parents. House Ironglaive has offered their performance to the peals of thunder, a predictable and rote offering of the Saga of Aenarion, inoffensive but unimpressive as well, though did at least translate it into Anoqayen which certainly gave it some power. House Lionmane rendered unto him a finely made cloak, the pelt of a white lion, which the Phoenix King bore yet over his sumptuous red and purple robes.

House Firemane had produced an operetta describing Hekarti and Asuryan's sole venture together in punishing Hoeth for His lack of interest in the affairs of mortals and preening, weening overbearance in that matter, for subtlety is dead and buried; though Tethia, whatever else you may say of her, was not without skill in shifting the Winds to so paint that image.

And as it ends, so it falls to you to offer House Snowmane's gift to the new king. Your mother and father and brother and sister all alike had offered to help; but you had little need of it, though they bore ancestral arms to represent ancient warriors.

Mist pours out from the audience in the opera, creeping towards the stage even as you approach it yourself, staff clicking all the while as you approach. A smear of Aqshy and Ghur, symbol, as pure as you can manage, rests upon the stage, "bleeding" Shyish the shade of Amethyst. Not merely the Shyish of Fading, of Decay, of Doom, but the Shyish of death. Death growls fill the air as you approach what the wiser in the audience will already comprehend:

It is Draugnir, Father of Dragons, dying.

"She has done it then?" Certain transformations in your body caused by Ghur make your voice deep as the abyss rather than the chiming bell it usually is, and you can see your family leap in surprise.

Aqshy, Azyr, Ghur and Chamon burn bright upon the stage at your command, in the shape of a faceless figure. Asuryan.

She has, a voice at once subtle as an ember and crashing as the lightning says to be heard throughout the whole audience, and yet She has not won. For of tragedy I shall make art and beauty and wonder, once more, and prove there is nothing darkness can take that I cannot repair…

Aethis watches,clearly interested, and you know others may not have lost but you have certainly won.

T3 Epic Creation of Note, The Death of Draugnir: Being a relation of the creation of Ulthuan after the death of Draugnir at the hands Aneth Raema. A proper performance requires a Wizard or Wizards capable of the utilization of all eight Winds, though the most complicated figure is no doubt Asuryan, who at times wields all but one of the Winds: Ulgu. Being a meditation upon the capacity of art and song to lift the world from darkness, the implication is obvious.

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VIII 17, 4, 41

You wake up and put on your robe of darkest amber and your cloak of lightest blue silk and after praying go down to the dining room…only to see your mother and father waiting for you at the breakfast table, their armor of scale and maille on their stand and waiting for them, your father's bow and your mother's ax at the ready.

"You're leaving again? Already?"

They look up, and your mother smiles and toasts to you, the rich and dark qulfi in the glass lightly steaming the chill storm morning even as your father drinks his soft cider, slowly consuming scrambled eggs and honeyed bread slathered with butter and jelly that flakes apart in his hand as he pulls it, letting your mother speak. "Not yet no, but soon. You did warn us, after all, about those Druchii."

"So that's that then? I'm here for ten years and you can't say hello once in that time? You can't even say 'thank you for helping us raise our house out of the depths of treachery's shame'?""

"I was busy campaigning," your mother says even as the smile falls from her face, "but I did come home. You were busy too, or did you forget when you disappeared into the forge, or were busy cutting into the guts of some dead creature, or meddling about with old Druchii refuse?"

"I did not forget! It was important!"

"Yes well, it was also important to try and get Elror upon the throne so that Chrace's interests could be represented and we could have a king willing to fight for once! Oh but wait I forgot it's not magic or animals, so my two-hundred year old fool of a son is full willing to cast it aside and leave us supine in the face of the Druchii!"

"Him!" Your breath catches in your throat even as your mother's eyes widen and then narrow. "Tethia's father! Truly!"

"Oh how terrible it would have been for you, the Phoenix King being the father of a woman who loves you!"

You throw up your hands, letting the rich anger of Aqshy warm you.

Is it always to be this way? They abandon you, ignore you, leave you for decades, centuries, by yourself then pull you out when they think there is some use they can have out of you? Is this to be your family life until the weight of it finally, mercifully, kills you?

Then something else catches up to you.

"Love?"

You turn back around to ask your mother what she meant, only to find that she and your father have both disappeared, right when you needed them most.

Typical.

Results:

Found Source of Monsters and warned parents who can seek to garrison said area

+1 Chrace Standing, +10 Chrace Favors

New Total: 4 Standing, 40 Favors

+20 Favors with House Snowmane, 2 Standing

New Total, 6 Standing, 50 Favors

+2 Standing with Saphery, +10 Favors

New Total: 2 Standing, 10 Favors

+1 Standing with Loremasters of Hoeth, +10 Favors

New Total: 2 Standing, 20 Favors

+1 Standing with Archmages, +10 Favors

New Total: 2 Standing, 20 Favors

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Next turn up probably tomorrow or Tuesday. Not impossible today but I wouldn't bet on it.