Chapter Text
History—that blind, reaching thing—had pulled and plucked and pruned G’raha Tia until he was its perfect student. He’d been born for it, after a fashion, and the grand forces of nations on the move had shunted him off to Sharlayan where he could study its winding paths and circling eddies. Of all the metaphors one could use for history, scholars often reached for comparisons of heft, as if history was best understood as a weight, the simple downward force of time. Which was as patently stupid as reducing the flow of a river to the mere direction of the water. History was vivid, sometimes only in the mind's eye—but here in Urth’s Gift it was visible, tangible, beading on his clothes, in his hair, streaking the thick glass of the alchemical tools he’d borrowed and soaking the bowstring he’d forgotten to put away. In short: it was wet.
Urth’s Gift was a dim, foggy gully in the South Shroud that would be altogether too dismal if it weren’t the storied grave of Lady Urth, a heroic figure surviving in Allagan legends from the Third Astral Era. Long before the creaking oaks nodding over this place had sprouted, she had locked a local god in a crystalline prison and spent the last of her lifeblood drawing up a wellspring to seal it. The spring flowed from here still, proof that the Lady had once lived cascading over the descending steps of the watercourse and down through the years, her magic erupting in splashing jets of water and jutting slabs of iridescent crystal, in mist that did not reach beyond the bounds of the fount but never dissipated within it. It seeped into the surrounding area, rarely and under exact conditions creating deposits of elementally aspected ore.
That ore was what had brought him here. After some slight trouble, he’d found a deposit and took the liberty of refining it in the tiny camp he’d set up in a rocky, sheltered corner. The camp was nearly packed up now, the refined aethersand in a waxed leather bag that was slick with condensation and dampening his pocket. He looked out over the rivulets bubbling below his outpost, toward the faint blue water sprites dancing in air tart with the smell of magic. The canopy rustled above him, and he swung his head up to see a lemur swinging by in long, graceful arcs.
It slowed to a stop above his camp, pausing to peer down at the rolled bundles of supplies. It swayed a little on the branch, raised its head to stare at the man chosen by history, and defecated.
He twitched and closed his eyes rather than watch it slide down the alchemy set. He’d have to look at it long enough later when he scrubbed it clean. Another chore added to the list.
G’raha was many things—a historian, an Archon, a Student of Baldesion, a marksman—with ambition enough for more. One title he did not aspire to, however, was errand boy. Despite his clarity on the subject, that did not stop the overseer of Saint Coinach’s Find from sending him as one. G’raha suspected Rammbroes saw him less as an official observer and more as an obstacle.
Not that he had observed much of late. He sighed as he bent to search his pack for a cleaning cloth. The expedition he’d been so desperate to join had been mired in a deadlock with the Goldsmith’s Guild for weeks now. The technologists of the Ironworks insisted that they required aethersand if they were to have any hope of breaching the tower, but no amount of gold could buy what was not there to have.
It was evident other avenues had to be explored, every promising vendor queried. In Gridania, the city-state buried deep in the forest of the Black Shroud, the selection of goods at market could be described as eclectic if you were being kind, and unreliable if you were not. More saliently, they could have been perused by someone who had not written his Archon thesis on the very civilization whose artifacts they meant to unearth. Alas.
Predictably, the stalls of the Shaded Bower had been barren of aethersand and the master of the markets quite cross with him for even asking after it. But G’raha had traveled far to join the work on the Crystal Tower and was increasingly loath to let it stagnate any longer. If he was sent to fetch a compound, fetch it he would.
G’raha had left the city with naught but an armful of alchemical scrolls, borrowed tools, and the probable location of raw ore, yet he would be returning to their camp at Saint Coinach’s Find with not one, but two packages of aethersand. A few days past the deadline that Rammbroes had set, perhaps, but the man shouldn’t argue with results. Which was what G’raha planned to say when the overseer received the bill for the tools.
He hadn’t exactly secured the second package yet, but his success in refining the ore had left him fit to burst with confidence. Rammbroes really shouldn’t complain. And if he did, G’raha felt far too pleased with himself to mind. The trick to maintaining the water aspected energies of the ore was quite simple, actually, once you—
From the corner of his eye, he caught someone walking down the cavernous path into Urth’s Gift. He ducked behind the boulders shielding his improvised workstation and peered at the trail below. Just as well he had almost finished packing. He’d been warned of poachers and bandits in the area but had encountered none so far. He didn’t particularly mind if his luck ran out right as he was leaving, so—wait.
He was certain he had seen the traveler before. She was a somewhat distinctive-looking young woman, one of those miqo’te with the gray skin particular to Keepers of the Moon, white stained over her eyes in the style of clans from the Shroud. He had seen her at their base camp in the Find, carrying a teetering stack of boxes for the president of the Ironworks, and assumed she was an assistant to Cid. But the spear in her hands looked well-used, something in the way she carried it suggested easy familiarity, and she crept through the forest with the kind of grace unlikely to be found in a lab-hand. He updated his assumption to adventurer-assistant, hired on for the expedition. And here they had sent her after him.
He narrowed his eyes. They thought he needed a minder, did they? Well, they’d see her return empty-handed, and see him return soon after that with double the prize expected. She continued down the trail, and he leapt into the thick branches of the trees above.
The adventurer slowed as she picked her way into Urth’s Gift proper. He matched her pace in the trees as to not overtake her. Really, for a relatively open trail, she was not making good time. And she was holding her spear so close that her nose nearly brushed it when she flicked her head between the trees to either side. Was she… frightened? He couldn’t see her face, but the brown fur of her tail puffed out, and her knuckles stood out sharp on her hands.
He sighed quietly to himself. The master of the markets had likely scared her with tales of the boar that claimed this patch of forest. Parsemontret had spoken of the hog in overly dramatic tones, calling it a particularly pernicious beast, a betusked nightmare, and more besides. He supposed it might have been. However, the master had also called him a desperate fool for seeking it out, and that he was not.
The adventurer found the boar shortly, bristling with arrows and quite dead. It lay with its head half-submerged in one of the shallow pools at the center of Urth’s Gift. Though there could be no doubt about its condition, she approached it with her spear raised. The weapon flickered in her hands as soon as she was within range and a new gash appeared in the beast’s throat. It had been dead too long to even bleed, but only then did she relax. G’raha wondered at this, confusion smoothing the edges of his frustration.
The adventurer laughed, a bright burst of relief, and shook her head. She knelt and began to search the pool. He was sure he had gathered all the available ore and considered telling her so before a more interesting idea bloomed in his mind. He hardly stopped to consider it—what could be the harm?—and settled into the boughs of his tree-perch.
As softly as he could manage, he cleared his throat. Then, as he’d seen from lecturers in the halls of the Studium and bards on stages and street corners, he projected his voice over the pools. “You are too late, adventurer—and not only for the entertainment. You will find no trace of the ore which but recently lay here. Nay, not so much as a speck.”
From her nervousness earlier, he expected her to jump or swing her spear about at the sound of his voice. A little disappointingly, she only started, then co*cked her head as she listened, trying to pinpoint his hiding place. Best to move this along before she found him.
“Ah... no. You will never spy me from there. For the time being at least, you will have to trust the evidence of your ears. Now stop squinting at the foliage and listen.”
She did not stop squinting at the foliage, but she did appear to be listening. He was willing to settle for that.
“As I told you, the water-blessed mineral you hoped to find is gone—taken by me,” he said, letting just a touch of smugness into his tone. “Victory has made me magnanimous, however. Accordingly, I have decided to share the location of an alternative source of aethersand with you—the wind-touched variety, to be specific. I trust I have your attention?”
She perked up at that, then nodded slowly.
“Good. A band of Ixal in the North Shroud keeps a quantity of the abrasive for the purpose of removing impurities from lesser crystals.” The adventurer hummed to herself and turned to look precisely in the direction of the Ixal settlement. She knew the area, clearly. This could be more interesting yet.
“Well?” he taunted. “Do you mean to dally here all day? Make haste, adventurer, before I snatch another prize from under your nose! This is to be a race.”
She fiddled with her spear for a moment, making a show of oh-so-carefully tightening it into the loops of the strap slung across one shoulder. Once it was snug across her back, she looked up—directly into the nest of branches where he crouched, a co*cky grin tempered with a shine of genuine glee.
He gathered his legs under himself and prepared to spring from the branches. “The Ixali logging grounds in the North Shroud shall be our destination. And that is where the real amusem*nt will begin. May the best—hey!”
The adventurer bolted from a dead standstill and sprinted down the path through ankle-deep water. He leapt into the branches of the nearest tree, then the next, and for a few seconds he kept up with her. Then, following no trail or markings he could perceive, she dove off the path into the bush.
He deviated from his planned route, following her for curiosity’s sake, but couldn’t make the turn in time and lost ground. The foliage grew dense and the adventurer, clad in dark greens and browns, dissolved into it. But it was a race, after all, and she sacrificed stealth for speed. Leaves rustled where she ran until she broke out onto a path, with just enough flat stone dotting the earth to prove it had once been a road.
G’raha jumped from the branches and landed in a puff of dusty earth. On his left: empty trail. On his right: the crumbling walls of an ancient fortress. He lost a step to pure astonishment—the size, age, and location of the structure meant it had to be Amdapor Keep, bulwark of the city that birthed White Magic, routed by voidsent in the War of the Magi, with the ruins allegedly hidden by elementals. Indeed, it looked as if the forest conspired to hide it, or perhaps consume it. The adventurer shot through the wide, broken gate without a glance back. He followed, more than a twinge mournful there was no time to investigate what remained of the structure beneath the moss and grasping vines.
The courtyard within looked as if it had grown out of the forest instead of back into it. Flagstones made way for a field, brickwork parted for roots, and above, terraces supported gardens they had never been built for. The adventurer hopped up one of those, through wildflowers waving over balustrades, and disappeared over the edge.
She launched herself up the walls in two bounding leaps. He raised his eyebrows at that and took a more measured route up. By the time he reached the top the Shroud had closed behind her, bushes and branches shaking only where the wind tousled the leaves.
At least he could feel the wind again above the wall—it may have been cool enough in Urth’s Gift, but summer was in full swing outside the darkest hollows of the wood. Sweat dried on his skin and he looked ruefully at the blank, traceless forest, supposing he should return to the path he’d originally planned and resign himself to a graceful acceptance of second place. He recalled that the spear the adventurer carried had a wicked gleam to its blade, and wondered if she intended to fight her way through the Ixal.
G’raha made good time on his own, having scouted this path to the logging camp before. The bag of aethersand weighed oddly in his pocket and he realized the damn thing not only stayed wet, but continuously produced more water to soak the waxed leather and seep into anything it touched. Some effect of the elemental aspect, no doubt, and an annoying one. He slowed to shake it out more than once, vowing that if Rammbroes found any more errands to be done, they would be done by someone else.
He approached the camp listening for the sound of the river, but the thumps and crashes of a commotion filtered through the forest first. Some slender trees had been left standing at the edge of the forest; he stopped there to see what was making the Ixal squawk so, then climbed up further to get a good view.
From that height, he beheld a mass panic in miniature. The unfolding chaos was unintelligible at first, but he watched to find which details told the story. He squatted low on the branch and dug his fingers into the rough, sun-warmed bark of the trunk.
The present, as always, contained the past: most of the feathered beastmen clustered around the entryway, where piles of logs were stored for shipment. The largest pile, it seemed, had suffered a sudden and catastrophic loss of some vital support mechanism. Ixal clustered there, some straining to hold the remaining logs back, others in twos or threes chasing roll-aways, leaving worktables and tools scattered by their passing.
G’raha looked to the supply tent he had noted when he first found the logging station. It stood at the far end, untouched. Did she miss it, or was she still working her way around the perimeter? Ah, no—the adventurer poked her head between the flaps and marked the guard left standing outside the tent. He thought she may have smiled; it was hard to tell at this distance. She stepped out of the tent holding, of all things, a tarp, and the prize: an overinflated leather bag tucked under one arm.
He didn’t have long to ponder what in the seven hells she was planning to do with a tarp before she had it over the guard’s head and pelted hard for the forest with a sharp bark of laughter. G’raha laughed aloud himself, then the adventurer slid under a worktable to avoid two Ixal trying to tackle her and slammed her forehead on the way back out, and he almost lost his balance on the narrow branch.
He righted himself, catching his breath in time to see what had to be the Ironwork’s most athletic assistant dodging around Ixal trying to take her out at the knees or snatch the bag she cradled against her chest. She rubbed at her head once, but otherwise moved like the wind itself carried her, featherless but free of the earth’s pull in a way the birdlike beastmen were not. He blinked, trying to reconcile this with the scared girl on the trail in Urth’s Gift. The majority of the Ixal were after her now, and she was forced away from the treeline. G’raha leaned forward as they closed off all paths except where the camp backed up to the river. He hoped she could swim.
She didn’t have to. She sailed over the river instead of into it, a couple arrows belatedly arcing after her and falling short. At the peak of her jump, she whooped, then crashed into the forest out of sight.
For a mercy, she didn’t move far once she landed, and G’raha was able to catch up to her on the other side. He found her panting with her back against a tree, the bag still clutched in her arms.
Not tired of this game just yet, he chose to remain in the canopy, calling, “Bravo! That was quite a show, adventurer! Why, the spectacle proved so enthralling that all thoughts of aethersand slipped my mind. I appear to have forfeited our little race! Congratulations—the wind-touched abrasive is yours.”
Her grip loosened on the bag as she looked for him; it began to float away. She snatched it back down and shrugged in his direction.
He applauded, then checked his pockets for the aethersand he had refined in Urth’s Gift, considering. “And yet, having been treated to such a memorable performance, I cannot help feeling that the greater prize is mine. This inequity must not stand. I insist that you accept a token of my appreciation. Payment for this entertainment will be waiting for you to the east, in a clearing within Proud Creek. Pray retrieve the gift ere it is crushed beneath the iron feet of the dullahans!”
He didn’t wait to announce the race this time, determined to beat her there and place the bag in a suitably challenging location.
She spoke for the first time then, crying out after him, “Hey! Come back!”
“Catch up!” he called over his shoulder, and ran.
