Turn 37 Social - 2488 - Part 2
Your work in the northern parts of the continent keeps you away from Karak Eight Peaks for the majority of your time, but you return there fairly regularly to consult your personal library, to make decisions regarding the construction of your much larger one, and, of course, to spend time with Panoramia. Now, with the Jade Order officially a party to the Waystone Project, there's no barrier save her busy schedule keeping her from visiting you in Laurelorn, with the side-benefit of it giving her the opportunity to explore the most magical and benign forest within the Empire's borders. So with a packed lunch and a satchel full of tools and sample containers the two of you set off into the forest to see how the long habitation of the Eonir has shaped it.
"A forest is a forest, isn't it?" you ask of her as the two of you make your way into the trees.
She smiles at you, seeing right through your play of ignorance, but responds anyway. "In about the same way that a Karak is a mountain. At first glance it might be the same, but if you look close you start to see the small external changes that hint at how much has changed underneath. For instance, look at this." She walks over to a nearby tree with a large vine wrapped around the trunk. "A rooted scandent vine, possibly hemiparasitic, possibly just a liana, there's debate about whether that's commensalist or even symbiotic. But look, the climbing pattern is unnaturally uniform. See there?" She points upwards into the canopy. "Though the trunk narrows higher up, the distance between bands remains the same." She gives the vine an experimental tug, then without hesitation she starts clambering upwards. You watch her progress until you're satisfied she's not going to slip and fall, and then use Smoke and Mirrors to appear on the branch she's heading towards.
"Do you have to do the smoke every time?" she observes wryly as she pulls herself up onto the branch.
"Actually, yes. The spell is actually simpler if broken into cantrips and interwoven with another piece of magic, so I use an Illusion of some smoke. It's the only spell powerful enough while also being benign and not dependent on specific circumstances."
"Ooh, commensalist magic. I wonder, does that indicate an inefficiency in the base design that the interweaving manages to bypass, or is it a cunning use of harmonious design? Anyway, the reason we're up here." She looks at where the vine finishes its climb by wrapping itself around a fork in the branches, creating an almost completely flat platform. She puts a foot onto it experimentally, then fully steps onto it. "It's a firing platform," she says. "Look, there's even less branches directly below here than on the other sides of the tree, and if you look there," she points, "you can see where the climbing vine has strangled out a branch that would have obstructed the view from here, but it worked around the ones on the other sides of the tree."
"So in the same way humans tamed wolves into dogs, the Elves have tamed plants to do jobs for them?"
"We tamed plants too, you should see the wild ancestors of the plants we farm. But that's so much easier a job, just pick the largest seed or friendliest puppy to breed more of. To create something this specific must have taken either a much deeper understanding of selective breeding, or the use of magic to completely rebuild the organism for a specific purpose."
"Cadaeth did imply that the lornalim weren't entirely natural. I'd figured that she meant that each plant was carefully sculpted as it grew for a specific purpose, but if they custom-make entire species for specific jobs..."
"Isn't that what their mythology says about them? That the Elves were custom-made as guardians of Ulthuan by Asuryan and Lileath?"
"It does contrast with what the Teutogens and Taleutens said, that they were the Chosen of Ulric and Taal respectively. That implies a selection from a pre-existing population, rather than them being made from scratch."
"Perhaps they inherited some of those techniques, and the Eonir have used them to shape the forest. A forest where no matter where you were, you could look around and find an easy climb to a concealed firing position with a great field of fire..." She looks down, and then kneels to inspect the underside of the platform. "With provisions too, judging by the fruit."
"Or a convenient source of poison for their arrows."
Panoramia withdraws her hand from where she'd been about to pluck one. "That would be a possibility too," she says, opening her satchel and fishing through it for gloves and a glass jar.
After Panoramia finishes collecting samples and observations from the vine, the two of you move on in your meander through the sculpted forest and come across several other oddities of interest. There is a tree that she theorizes accumulates trace minerals from the soil and concentrated them in nodules along its trunk, and in the hollows left by previously-extracted nodules spites have made their nests, and some glare menacingly out and chatter litanies of improbable threats. There are dense thickets of bushes with broad fronds that would provide excellent cover to the light-footed, and the habit the fronds have of folding in on themselves and revealing stems covered in long, hooked thorns mean that anyone with too heavy a tread will find no shelter among them. And the natural-looking paths through the trees that make wandering through Laurelorn so easy are fringed with coiled roots that, with some experimentation, Panoramia is able to provoke into uncoiling and choking a stretch of the path, turning it into an uneven and treacherous surface that would slow any march to a crawl.
"There's an awareness to the trees," Panoramia says thoughtfully as the two of you enjoy your lunch in an excessively picturesque grove. "Which isn't unusual in itself, trees pay more attention than most people think, but it's usually only interoceptory unless something gets their attention. These trees are watching, and they're curious."
"The curiosity of a domesticated beast, or the curiosity of a confused sentry?"
"Good question." She mulls it over. "I don't think they're sentries, exactly. Their thoughts are too slow to make a decision quickly enough for that to be practical. But their attention being piqued would leave a trail in the wake of anyone with good Magesight and a familiarity with them."
You run your eyes over the surrounding trees. "Firing platforms and metal farms and spite nests and caltrops and watchdogs, all in one. The entire forest has been sculpted into the ideal terrain for skirmish and attrition, a hundred miles of it in every direction around Tor Lithanel and the Wishing Woods and the Rainbow Falls."
"And then Nordland started peeling it away."
You nod grimly. "Schlaghugel is maybe sixty miles from Tor Lithanel, and their loggers would have been following the river upstream so it could carry the logs back to the village for processing. If they bypassed the hilly terrain immediately upriver of them, they could have been logging less than forty miles from Tor Lithanel's walls."
Panoramia grimaces. "That puts a new face on matters. I'd thought the matter was a match for the reputation of the Asrai, killing at the slightest provocation, over just a few felled trees and a few tiny villages on the wrong side of a river. But to lose half of their buffer zone..."
You nod. "And at a pace too slow for any one Nordlander to be meaningfully responsible. It's been eight hundred years of very slow encroachment."
She sighs. "What a mess."
The rest of the day passes similarly, and you find yourself quite happy to follow Panoramia and listen to her expound on a topic of such interest to her, both out of personal curiosity and out of enjoying listening to her speak with such passion and delight. By the time the sun starts to dip and the two of you return to the city her satchel is bulging with specimens, which gives you a perfect opportunity to introduce her to a laboratory filled with the finest Eonir artisanry that money can buy. Perhaps it hasn't been the most conventionally romantic day, but you wouldn't change anything about it.
- I normally prefer longer updates, but the weather's been playing up here and I'll feel better knowing there's no chance of losing this if my computer ends up floating out to sea.
"A forest is a forest, isn't it?" you ask of her as the two of you make your way into the trees.
She smiles at you, seeing right through your play of ignorance, but responds anyway. "In about the same way that a Karak is a mountain. At first glance it might be the same, but if you look close you start to see the small external changes that hint at how much has changed underneath. For instance, look at this." She walks over to a nearby tree with a large vine wrapped around the trunk. "A rooted scandent vine, possibly hemiparasitic, possibly just a liana, there's debate about whether that's commensalist or even symbiotic. But look, the climbing pattern is unnaturally uniform. See there?" She points upwards into the canopy. "Though the trunk narrows higher up, the distance between bands remains the same." She gives the vine an experimental tug, then without hesitation she starts clambering upwards. You watch her progress until you're satisfied she's not going to slip and fall, and then use Smoke and Mirrors to appear on the branch she's heading towards.
"Do you have to do the smoke every time?" she observes wryly as she pulls herself up onto the branch.
"Actually, yes. The spell is actually simpler if broken into cantrips and interwoven with another piece of magic, so I use an Illusion of some smoke. It's the only spell powerful enough while also being benign and not dependent on specific circumstances."
"Ooh, commensalist magic. I wonder, does that indicate an inefficiency in the base design that the interweaving manages to bypass, or is it a cunning use of harmonious design? Anyway, the reason we're up here." She looks at where the vine finishes its climb by wrapping itself around a fork in the branches, creating an almost completely flat platform. She puts a foot onto it experimentally, then fully steps onto it. "It's a firing platform," she says. "Look, there's even less branches directly below here than on the other sides of the tree, and if you look there," she points, "you can see where the climbing vine has strangled out a branch that would have obstructed the view from here, but it worked around the ones on the other sides of the tree."
"So in the same way humans tamed wolves into dogs, the Elves have tamed plants to do jobs for them?"
"We tamed plants too, you should see the wild ancestors of the plants we farm. But that's so much easier a job, just pick the largest seed or friendliest puppy to breed more of. To create something this specific must have taken either a much deeper understanding of selective breeding, or the use of magic to completely rebuild the organism for a specific purpose."
"Cadaeth did imply that the lornalim weren't entirely natural. I'd figured that she meant that each plant was carefully sculpted as it grew for a specific purpose, but if they custom-make entire species for specific jobs..."
"Isn't that what their mythology says about them? That the Elves were custom-made as guardians of Ulthuan by Asuryan and Lileath?"
"It does contrast with what the Teutogens and Taleutens said, that they were the Chosen of Ulric and Taal respectively. That implies a selection from a pre-existing population, rather than them being made from scratch."
"Perhaps they inherited some of those techniques, and the Eonir have used them to shape the forest. A forest where no matter where you were, you could look around and find an easy climb to a concealed firing position with a great field of fire..." She looks down, and then kneels to inspect the underside of the platform. "With provisions too, judging by the fruit."
"Or a convenient source of poison for their arrows."
Panoramia withdraws her hand from where she'd been about to pluck one. "That would be a possibility too," she says, opening her satchel and fishing through it for gloves and a glass jar.
After Panoramia finishes collecting samples and observations from the vine, the two of you move on in your meander through the sculpted forest and come across several other oddities of interest. There is a tree that she theorizes accumulates trace minerals from the soil and concentrated them in nodules along its trunk, and in the hollows left by previously-extracted nodules spites have made their nests, and some glare menacingly out and chatter litanies of improbable threats. There are dense thickets of bushes with broad fronds that would provide excellent cover to the light-footed, and the habit the fronds have of folding in on themselves and revealing stems covered in long, hooked thorns mean that anyone with too heavy a tread will find no shelter among them. And the natural-looking paths through the trees that make wandering through Laurelorn so easy are fringed with coiled roots that, with some experimentation, Panoramia is able to provoke into uncoiling and choking a stretch of the path, turning it into an uneven and treacherous surface that would slow any march to a crawl.
"There's an awareness to the trees," Panoramia says thoughtfully as the two of you enjoy your lunch in an excessively picturesque grove. "Which isn't unusual in itself, trees pay more attention than most people think, but it's usually only interoceptory unless something gets their attention. These trees are watching, and they're curious."
"The curiosity of a domesticated beast, or the curiosity of a confused sentry?"
"Good question." She mulls it over. "I don't think they're sentries, exactly. Their thoughts are too slow to make a decision quickly enough for that to be practical. But their attention being piqued would leave a trail in the wake of anyone with good Magesight and a familiarity with them."
You run your eyes over the surrounding trees. "Firing platforms and metal farms and spite nests and caltrops and watchdogs, all in one. The entire forest has been sculpted into the ideal terrain for skirmish and attrition, a hundred miles of it in every direction around Tor Lithanel and the Wishing Woods and the Rainbow Falls."
"And then Nordland started peeling it away."
You nod grimly. "Schlaghugel is maybe sixty miles from Tor Lithanel, and their loggers would have been following the river upstream so it could carry the logs back to the village for processing. If they bypassed the hilly terrain immediately upriver of them, they could have been logging less than forty miles from Tor Lithanel's walls."
Panoramia grimaces. "That puts a new face on matters. I'd thought the matter was a match for the reputation of the Asrai, killing at the slightest provocation, over just a few felled trees and a few tiny villages on the wrong side of a river. But to lose half of their buffer zone..."
You nod. "And at a pace too slow for any one Nordlander to be meaningfully responsible. It's been eight hundred years of very slow encroachment."
She sighs. "What a mess."
The rest of the day passes similarly, and you find yourself quite happy to follow Panoramia and listen to her expound on a topic of such interest to her, both out of personal curiosity and out of enjoying listening to her speak with such passion and delight. By the time the sun starts to dip and the two of you return to the city her satchel is bulging with specimens, which gives you a perfect opportunity to introduce her to a laboratory filled with the finest Eonir artisanry that money can buy. Perhaps it hasn't been the most conventionally romantic day, but you wouldn't change anything about it.
- I normally prefer longer updates, but the weather's been playing up here and I'll feel better knowing there's no chance of losing this if my computer ends up floating out to sea.
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