✅ A Catechism of Strange Things

[Darian]

The alchemist adjusted his goggles. He had brewed these potions especially for this. To carry him further than ever before, and faster. He had forsaken his usual case for one tied around his shoulder. The wind had meant any hat he had wanted to bring would be torn off by the sheer wind. His scarf fluttered in the wind behind him, the mask on his face the only thing that made breathing vaguely manageable.

He had stopped at Trell, long enough to eat a small snack and grab a couple of hours of sleep, and then it was time to move on.

Now he surfed through the skies faster than he ever had while he had his wings. Alchemy danced in his veins. This far up, this far from the sea he did not need invisibility not to be seen, only the eyes of a few shocked albatrosses were even here to see him at this height.

He had spent a lot of time working out the angles, figuring out the correct ways to do this. All he needed was an opening. That was why he was speeding towards Tur. He did not need a portal, that he could supply on his own. What he needed was a key. He had a pouch sewn into the inner lining of his pockets. Two pieces of chalk. One to get him there, one to get him back. Filtering out a dragon's ability to travel the planes had not been easy, but he had them now, one primed for the Material Plane, and now he just needed another primed for the plane of Peace.

And where would you find something to give you access to the plane of Peace? Tur. He planted a booted foot on the surface. Gravity seeming to catch up with him as he set down. The strange alchemy burning in his veins burning out their last little bits of energy in setting him down. It felt weird to rely on his own strength to move again, but he did not have much time to enjoy the feeling. It was time to get moving.

 

[charybdis]

Progress had no meaning here.

Tur, for all its lack of mention in the great annals of history and relatively forgotten and disregarded state, was evidently a very normal island, for whatever that was worth. The light sapphire of the ocean waves lapped hungrily at the peach-colored sands, scattering the brilliant sunlight above that was dimmed only by the passage of a random cloud here or there. There were a few docks and ports and harbors that had been scattered across the coastline but time and nature had, it seemed, collected all of them with their greedy fingers as whatever had been once crafted and constructed was now brought to either ruin or little more than the backdrop for the island's flora. From the sky the alchemist could have made out the heavy scars that still ran through the center of the land as well, crisscrossing what should have been a nest of vibrant life with deep gashes of black and glowing red, emanating heat in a most unpredictable pattern.

This particular clearing was, it seemed, naturally-made. A tree had fallen from either age or pestilence and pushed down the rest of the underbrush. allowing a break from the thick underbrush that seemed to extend as far as the eye could see in all of the other directions. Around him was scattered the pieces of what appeared to have once been a watchtower. Perhaps in the past it had been high enough to allow sight over the tops of the trees; now it did not even quite come up to the height of the alchemist himself, with the roof having caved in a very long time ago and the curved staircase lining the interior wall cracked and missing just about every other step. It wouldn't have been much larger than a small hovel in the poorer districts of Aelyria Prime. Whatever furniture had been in its interior was long gone and rotted by age. Only the small sketch of a curved rune that appeared distinctly elvish indicated that it had been of use to anyone at any time at all.

There was a dull reddish-colored glow coming from the east: another scar, if Darian recalled correctly from the sights that had filled his vision during his speedy flight, that had created something of a gully through which the trickle of water could be seen even from great heights. To the north came the loud caw of something alive that sounded distinctly avian, yet not quite anything that would have been observed on the Medonian continent. And to the south? Well, that should have been the beachfront if the alchemist had recalled his directions correctly, and where the edge of Tur could be found.

 

[Darian]

Click. Click. Click. The lenses on his goggles swapped with every step, drinking in information on every spectrum he could think of. He inspected the place he had entered. Saw the grooves of ancient machines of war that spread across the island. Formed theories. Guessed at their points of origin. Even through the isolationist nature of the empire he had heard whispers of the war fought here. Thousands of years back and the scars were here still.

His own people were long lived and you would be hard pressed to find anyone that knew of a time K'terak and Trelore had not been at war. Tur was all that remained of the war on land, now it was a war fought on the seas, on little islands like this. A thousand beestings rather than a single all consuming conflict.

And here a divine being had struck, demanding an end to it. He put his hand on the fallen tree. Strange for a conflict to cause a god of peace to appear. Usually it was the other way around. Had there been factions within the elven armies working to make peace happen behind the scenes? Questions for another time. The dirt of this place coloured his boots as he walked through it. It all seemed abandoned. With Srennius caught in an eternal place was this place decaying by itself, or was the things the planetar had placed here continuing to work on their own.

He stopped at the watchtower. Theories only got you so far at one point. He picked at its remnants curiously, the rotted wood decaying at his mere touch. Falling apart. Given the elvish rune, perhaps this had been a guard post in the war at one point. Ancient pieces of pottery cracked underfoot. There were still things alive here at least. Birds perhaps. Sphynxes were said to be here. Whether they were or not, hard to say. They were creatures of Srennius, how would such things fare without their divine?

He knew of a way to check, of course. Simple, really. He tugged the glove off his left hand, the dark leather leaving his hands regretfully. The one thing he could never entirely got rid of no matter what shape he took. An ouroboros twining itself at his wrist, a symbol of alchemy to be sure, but also a symbol of Time. And that was what he dipped into as he placed his hand on the remnants of the watchtower and let its history sink in.

 

[charybdis]

Life went on. It always did. It always would. Tur was no exception, despite the most exceptional events that had happened here many, many lifetimes ago. There were vines now, and ferns and trees and flowers to cover the worst of the scars of war, and yet even then it wasn’t enough. Even a thousand elfin or dracon lifetimes would never be enough to forget the life that was both lost and gained here, and how the touch of the immortals came down to press their wills upon the charges they claimed.

The old watchtower stretched like bleached bone toward the sunlight, trying desperately to remind the very land of what had occurred here and just what had been lost. The knoll it occupied was a gentle thing, and yet had presumably been enough to grant a decent vantage point of the flattest incline that came up from the beach toward the center of the island. It would have afforded a view to presumably protect against landing parties—if, at least, normal strategy dictated their movements.

Now, though, it was simply ruin and memory. It was to the latter that the alchemist reached, using the touch of his own hand against the surface of the stone to see what had been done here and step back across time itself to when it was once whole.

Whole. Above him, Darian could see the tower in all its glory. It was a grand structure, made from the porous rock native to the island at first and then strengthened and refitted with materials brought from Quel’thanas itself. The veins of glittered minerals hummed, filled as they were with the very magic of the waters of the noble elves’ land that was said to feed their great spring itself. Runes had been cut into its frames to enhance these abilities: strength, vigilance, power. Shimmering essence was funneled into being to braid through its mortar, rendering the very structure unbreakable to any conventional attack.

And yet they had been anything but. He saw the purple-skinned elves, grand and tall and shimmering in their golden armors sending a flurry of arrows out the murder holes and from the tower’s upper perches. Mages cast multicolored spells into the sky with abandon. Spearmen and swordsmen alike encircled the exterior. They defended the area with their very lives and to the last with a ferocity that would have put even the greatest warriors of legend to shame.

But the true threat wasn’t from the outer reaches at all. Something inside tore apart the magical fabric that had once held the tower’s stones together, breaking the blocks piece by piece and shattering them into nothing more than jagged shards scattered onto the ground. Everything built by arcana seemed to dry up, wither, and die in a single instant. The elves that had once manned it had died, all violently, and the tower itself fell to utter ruin.

And then time passed again, and it was now here, with the alchemist, on Tur, on this day.

 

[Darian]

There was a blink.

For a second there were two Darians.

The one that had seen all this history, the one that had spent thousands of years watching the history of this tower.

And the one that had been standing here for a couple of seconds. Melding the memories of the years that had passed. Thousands of them, watching a ruin, watching the defence and the battles, watching the construction. It all added up.

The two Darians collided, memories were stored. His head contained untold millennia of information. A laboratory dating back to the start of time itself. A dragon's lifespan. An archon's life. Hundreds of little things he had wanted to know and such a handy way to get answers. And now the thousands of years contained in this tower. The alchemist's head was full to bursting. A memory palace to rival the City itself was where he kept it. Contained within houses, within thousands of rooms. Important memories, unimportant ones, all of them.

It took some getting used to. The longer the gap, the worse it was. A human lifespan, generally not much a problem. Thousands of years? That was going to give him a little bit of a headache for a while as memories were stored away properly. Organised according to what was important and what was not.

With no one around he indulged himself and briefly massaged his temples as the information settled in. He pulled the glove back on. With no living things around there was no one to help him work out what was useful and what was not. That meant it took longer.

He did not like admitting his own limitations, but without others around to allow him to borrow their excess brain capacity his own limitations were very apparent. The alchemist was without a doubt one of the most brilliant minds of this generation, and yet there were clear limits to what even he was able to do alone.

Annoying limits, to be sure. He would need to see what he could do about expanding them.

He eyed the remnants of the tower. Its guardians were long gone. Destroyed by time. Well. Destroyed by something else entirely first, probably the very force he was here looking for. Well, that or some surprise attack by the other side, but judging by how well it worked probably exactly the thing he was looking for. He filed away the runes for later, those would be useful.

He removed what might look like an oddly carved wooden block from a pouch at his waist. He twisted it just so, and then gave it a shake and it unfolded into a crossbow. Best not to take any chances with the wildlife. If there were any giant birds here, he would rather not have to deal with them.

Away then, towards the north and the centre of the island. If these were the outskirts, early battlegrounds. He would find what he needed towards the centre. The bird noises. Well, he would just need to worry about them when he came across them. He was not a bird watcher, or one who paid special attention to woodcraft in general, but he did not like the sound of those birds. And who knew what manner of thing might pop up here on an island abandoned for all this time.

 

[charybdis]

Tur was a wild and ravaged land. The life that had been born, bred, and thrived here first was now twisted underneath the weight of the war that had been raged across its sand dunes and forests and mountains. The air was heavy with both humidity and the memory of the great magics casted here. The ground was soft with both the sand and the blood that was shed here and never forgotten. The elves were a long-lived race and yet many had met their ends in this place, fighting over a scrap of land in between their self-proclaimed kingdoms all for the pursuit of unseen and unknown honor and glory.

And when the gods had cast their powers here? Well, the dice had been spun one more time. The product that had come out was a mishmash of what had been and what would never be, caught forever in stasis. As the alchemist left the ruined sentry tower and began the intrepid trudge through the underbrush, that same cawing that whistled through the sky came about again, this time a bit louder. The creatures were above, first behind, then in front, as the rhythmic thud of wings against the air added a syncopated rhythm to the sound.

Were those fingers on the wings? Was that a tuft of feathers on the crest of its head? It was hard to tell. The shadow loomed overhead quickly and just a bit too high against the suns to be more than a brief shadow that blinked across the sky before disappearing. But the alchemist had his goggles, and the lenses made that light a nonissue. It was a sizeable creature, perhaps on par with a farm horse of sorts, with a quartet of legs—or maybe two of them were arms?—dangling from its underbelly. And the skin was soft, maybe even furred, in between the lines of feathers that mostly sprung from its shoulders, back and neck. From below, the creature’s head appeared to mimic that of a great cat with a mane and whiskers to match.

And then it was gone.

The further northward the alchemist travelled, the thicker the foliage became. They were moving away from the beaches and the sea they bordered now and into the center of the island. This was Carmelya’s land, or perhaps once was, or should have been, but now had been abandoned to the wilds to cover what memories of its heavy, ancient past that it carried. It took effort to cut through vines and bushes that had not been crossed nor trod for centuries, perhaps even millennia. There were no paths nor roads nor any other pieces of civilization here.

But there were ruins. The watch tower on the beachhead wasn’t the only piece of elven infrastructure that had been left behind when the war had been so preemptively ended. There was more rubble from former buildings leftover, mostly now only small piles of rock and stone that had been used to found the most essential places. There were some scraps of machines of war, all crafted with the curved artistry so expected from Quel’thanas, and some pieces that were perhaps a bit more industrious than beautiful, presumably from their opponents.

By now, though, there were no more bodies and no more remains—only ghosts. Soon the alchemist came to yet another clearing in the woods that, it seemed, had been the scene of a battle of some decent magnitude. There were fragments of long-tarnished armor and the scraps of weapons along with a few fragments of bone and skeleton scattered throughout the entire space. Many had lost their lives here, it seemed. Not even their memories lived on, mixed up and lost to the very dust as they were.

 

[Darian]

That winged cat was certainly something to worry about. Usually he would say griffin for something like that, but considering where he was, sphynx seemed more likely. That meant something survived here of what the god of peace had done.

Good.

Still. One should not waste an opportunity.

The alchemist picked a small book out from under his cloak and removed his glove. As he made his way through the battlefield, he used divine gift on the war machines as he came across them. Writing notes and blueprints into his book as he went. That would be useful for later.

The scenes of war that flashed through his eyes were an annoyance. A tragic lack of vision. These kinds of wars did nothing but exhaust the nations that performed them. Wholesale slaughter was not a good way to go about it. Armies of tens of thousands a giant waste.

No. A small strike was all that was needed. Figure out how to do the most damage with the least amount of effort.

Dracons, for all their reputation as a vanguard of Jorel's armies, were not naturally a warlike people. Why would you fight someone when you could infiltrate them, replace their leaders, and alter the course of a war that way.

He made his way through the undergrowth this way. Taking notes and storing memories away. Just because he did not approve of such devices did not mean that they were not useful. He did not move fast, not by any means, but slowly he was making his way towards the epicentre of where this battle had taken place, the place where the divine had manifested to end this conflict. Having to move around fallen trees or large bushes did not make this any faster. A machete would have done good work here, but he did not have the strength to keep swinging one and the scalpel he carried around would not be very useful in this regard.

 

[charybdis]

It was quiet here. Or was it?

The flittering memories of what had occurred here and the tolls taken were flashing like layers across the mind’s eye of the alchemist. He saw the elves, tall and regal beings, standing behind these machines and operating their gears and clutches and knobs. One or two were meant as siege machinery and thus had seen little use here. They were kept in reserve and covered, but age had eventually ravaged them too and turned what had once been finely-tuned instruments of war into little more than ruined, rotted pieces scattered to the winds.

But closer in the rings toward the center of the clearing were other machines, ones that hummed in the alchemist’s vision with life burning through them in their pasts. Those hailing from the kingdom of Quel’thanas were primarily powered by magic—some druidic, other sorceric, and still others by the power of thaumaturgy that burned from the very skies. Long ago had the last vestiges of the captured essences dissipated into the ambient environment. It was only in the past times and the histories did they still move and creak and groan, showing a world to which only the alchemist was privy.

The druid-engineered machines had wrenched themselves into the very earth, sending roots underground to grab at their enemies and pull them beneath the surface. Others empowered the nearby plant life itself, growing branches from trees to swipe at oncoming foes. Another, something that had seemingly been mostly made of glass with a great vortex of swirling golden-hued water in the center, had been the prize of the lot. This was an instrument of destruction, utilizing that second side of nature that trended everything toward decay in the decline of the cycle of life. Around it was circled a maelstrom of darkened energies that everything, even the purple-skinned elves that had brought it, worked it, and empowered it, avoided, as the space around it turned a terrible black.

There were fewer machines powered by sorcery, and most of them made to generate energy either in the form of shields or projectiles. The latter were spires, looking like needles sticking up through the grasses, that had been positioned strategically to protect the army’s flanks. The latter were great sprays like the frayed ends of a whip of cat-o-nine tails, igniting with terrible fire when they took to the sky to rain destruction down upon their foes.

The most protected and coveted machines were those that the gods’ magic itself ran. They veritably glowed golden, every single one of them, and had a quiet little hum of sound as if singing a chorus in the language of the Aetherians from which it had descended. The parts for these machines were fashioned primarily from metal and glass that shimmered brilliantly in the light. They were made for dispensing rage, that pent-up, righteous fury of those souls that were convinced beyond a single shadow of a doubt that they were, and always would be, right. All were inscribed with runes that invoked the All-Father, though some had added lines honoring the Goddess of the Harvest and another for a long-forgotten deity of the stars. These were the most fiercely guarded by the Quel’anthasan army. These were the most prized instruments of war that they had.

By now Darian had arrived in what appeared to be the center of the field. The images of the purple-skinned elves were beginning to disappear. Across the space were more pieces, but these were of a crafting that was precise, geometric, and exact rather than fluid like the ones behind him. In the stalemate between the lines was the ruin of innumerable lives. Though the bodies were long decayed and the remains buried underneath wind and dirt and the extremes, the weight of it was in the very ground itself. A few rusted weapons and bits of armor remained—a dim memory of what they represented, of how many were now gone.

It was a far few more paces in dense underbrush to get to where the other side’s machinery lay in its own ruins.

 

[Darian]

The inherent problems with these engines of war, the alchemist told himself, as he watched their construction one after being put together by elven smiths. Was that whatever he did, he would lack the necessary power source to make them work. Arcana was of little interest to him, but he could not deny that it had its uses. This was not like the mages he had seen in the empire though, they were too busy with revelling in their power to truly push the boundaries of what could be done, too boxed into their ways of thinking to ever step outside of the box. These elven mages had created one terrible thing after another, mages in the empire all just took part in the battle themselves rather than make machines to do so. A good thing perhaps, he would not like many of these to be found anywhere near him.

It was easy to be violent. It was easy to make murder the solution. Kill the other person and you removed the problem. Murder was easy. It was often far easier to slit someone's throat than having to deal with them. But there were reasons you did not. If nothing else for the challenge of it all. Weapons were easy, why do the hard thing when there was an easy option on the market. What he had seen here though, weapons of destruction unlike anything he had seen during the Xet war. No.

Still. He was the witness. He would see those who died here, he would see the destruction that was wrought. He made notes as he walked. Fashioning the power of the gods into weapons. That… that made him stop. Those runes he took extra special care to make note of. There was a power source he could tap, and a god he had no knowledge of? Interesting. Dead? Forgotten? Hmmm. Fascinating.

Moving through the underbrush was a pain, but he did so nonetheless. Seeing what the other side had to offer might offer more insights he would need down the line. So he took the time to seek those out as well. This had already been very fruitful, still, even with the detour he tried to keep moving towards the epicentre of it all. He needed the place where Srennius had manifested.

 

[charybdis]

The other side of the field was in the same state of forgotten disarray. These were the “dark” elves now, with those races that had been so unfairly thrust from their original homeland and settled in the mountains and underground caverns of K’Terak. Propaganda had called them evil, touched, Aeternian, and painted them as the cursed scourge whose only intent was to wipe out all that was light and holy and good in the lives of those that they had once called brother. The Kinslayers, the Quel’anthasans had called them—murderers of their own kind.

Was it that hatred, then, that had turned these “dark” elves to such ingenuity, touched as it was with an edge of desperation? Or was it always a latent ability within their very blood, to see the world and consider what they could do to control it? These weren’t the same machines that had littered the Trelorean side of the battlefield. This construction was sharper, harder, more precise, more distinct. The pieces were made of metal and stone more than wood—materials meant to endure, meant to last, and meant to enact their will on the natural processes of their environment and surroundings.

They had once been carefully strung up with gears and knobs and cables, though time had rendered all of that delicate machinery little more than rubble. While a few had the same sources of empowering magic as the Treloreans’, these only used it to run the pieces; most of the machinery was mechanical in nature. That engineering was what did the heavy lifting. And the ammunition?—it had been dug from the deep places in the earth, the alchemist could see, and inscribed with its own brand of unusual and forgotten magic. It was a dark art that consumed, rather than created. When it was fired in the direction of the Treloreans’ forces, it ate them and their spells and their magic-spun creations too.

But that wasn’t all that the K’Terakians had unleashed. Beasts beyond mortal comprehension had flung themselves across the battlefield. Very few of them had been in their natural, expected form. Instead, appendages made of metal and gears had been replaced or added. Senses had been amplified to be able to see and hear far beyond normal ranges. Weapons bladed, ranged, and everything in between had been constructed into their bodies and appendages. The elves themselves had mostly stayed back to run their crafts, letting their handiwork wreak the decimation against their foes.

The battle held here was great and terrible. It’d been a fight for the better and more centralized land in Tur, where the victor would be able to hold the island with only a small force against a myriad of assaults. It had been bloody and desperate. It had decimated both sides. Veritable millennia had been cut short in the dead that had been left behind.

But in the middle? There was no sign of divine interference—at least not immediately perceptible. Underneath the grass the ground had been flattened. A sigil shaped like two encapsulating ovals, one atop another with another twisted curve in the center had been cut into the dirt. And when it appeared, everything stopped. But the true power that had worked the scribble had not emanated from here but come from further in on the island, where, as his old eye locked in the history of the place saw, the great being itself had descended.

 

[Darian]

The alchemist did not forget the important things. His immense memory palace was filled to the brims with centuries, no, millennia of memories. He had seen the dawn of creation itself, he had been there for the Fall, he had seen far more than anyone his age ought to have. He had witnessed the lives of lowly clerks and fallen archons alike. To keep all this he had constructed in his mind a memory palace so grand one could get lost in its many halls. Some things were discarded. Not everything was useful, not everything had equal value.

He wondered, occasionally, if he had forgotten parts of his own life to make room for all these memories. Unimportant things, surely. But running up against the limits of his own mind was not a comforting thought.

This was why he took notes.

The notebook filling with scrawled references to runes and writings of power, inferences to be made from them, how machinery fit together, details from how the weapons worked. He was, in truth, not terribly interested in weapons. Killing something was easy. Making a weapon was not hard.

But they had other implications. Ways cogs could work together to produce greater results, ways to harness machinery, ways to create something that went beyond what was created here, ways to harness the power of reality itself to fashion sources of power.

This was all beside the point though, useful, but beside the point.

He was here for something else entirely.

He noted the sigil with some interest, but it was ultimately not what he was after. No, he had to get closer. Closer to where that sigil had come from. Picking his way through the ancient battlefield and the deep undergrowth at the same time the alchemist made his way towards where divinity had manifested. What he needed would be there.

 

[charybdis]

Onwards he trekked.

The world in his mind through that divine writing on his hand was one of blood and smoke and ruin. The battles that had been fought here were vicious things. Some were mere skirmishes. Others were fought in the shadows. But this one? This had been a stand, a crafting of sorts, where lines had been drawn with the intent to inscribe one side into the very fabric of history while the other was intended to be obliterated beyond all remembrance.

And yet still this wasn’t the site, the place where the manifestation of Peace had touched foot to ground. The sigil drawn on the ground was pulsating with power—but in the past lens. Now it was little more than a scar. But then? It veritably glowed. It led like veins across the surface as traces of what had been inscribed on this land to end the conflict, that great show of power that the planetar had descended upon the land like the most final hammer across what the elves had wrought.

It as this, then, that the alchemist would need to follow. It wound its most serpentine path across the land, cutting underneath underbrush now thick and wild and underneath the scars of what Treloreans and K’Terakians had left behind in force. It wasn’t drawn toward the center of the island. Instead, the spiderweb encircled what appeared to be a low mountain that, if the alchemist remembered correctly from his flight, was more toward the eastern reaches of the land and overlooking the crystalline sea beyond.

The lines drew themselves upward. It didn’t appear to be too difficult of a climb from first evaluation; the angles were shallow, the rocks rounded with time and flattened into sheets, and the elevation would have barely been classified as a hill by those that lived their lives on the mainland. But there also wasn’t any pathway up, either. Time had let the wilds ravage and reclaim it, and whatever structures the elves had built in the past to allow for surveillance were now long-gone.

And then somewhere off in the distance, a human face appeared. It was more than a stone’s throw away, standing on a ledge high above the alchemist. The face tilted to one side, then the other, which sent shudders through the loose hair that made up its circular mane. The great paws underneath scratched uneasily at the rock and, suddenly, both feathered wings unfurled to their full width, beating slightly against the air.

 

[Darian]

This had truly been an existential war. Most wars were for land, or honour, or money, or something simple. This had been an existential war, likely on par with the Cyraxian War. One of those things where one side was not merely defeated but annihilated. He could understand why a god of peace might take an interest in something like that.

He was tracing the path of a war that was fought thousands of years in the past. And despite trudging through some of the worst terrain he had been in for a good while, that left him waxing philosophical more than he really ought to.

Which was why, hand on the trunk of a tree, he froze and snapped back to reality. That had been a face.

Right. Okay.

Not human, not with that mane.

The alchemist ran through a mental checklist of the options he had available for dealing with wild critters. Strength, endurance, invisibility, flight. His fingers touched each vial lightly as he went through the list, then there were the other options. Smoke bombs, sleeping grenades, frost bombs.

He discarded flight quickly, gaining the air would do him no good against something that could fly. It might make him faster, but he did not particularly want to try to test his flying against this… well, presumably this was one of the sphynxes. That meant at least they were capable of surviving without Srennius, good to know. Maybe a connection to the Plane of Peace without a direct connection to its deity? A question to ponder for later.

For right now.

He was in the shit.

With that thing in the air he was going to really struggle going forward. The thick brush and trees would keep him from being immediately visible from the air. That was not as much of a problem, the problem was that every time he leaned or pushed up against a tree someone watching the canopy from above would immediately know where he was. Invisibility or no. Besides, it was a long trek, becoming invisible right now would do no good if he needed it an hour down the line.

The alchemist breathed slowly, considering his options carefully. Sometimes you just had to take a plunge, dive recklessly. This was not one of those times. He did his best to calm his heartbeat, feeling it almost thumping through into the tree he was holding onto. Right.

Calm.

First. Remove the hand slowly from the tree, no sudden movements here. That would just make things worse. He very much did not want to be seen, so he tried to be calm. Right.

Second. Continue onwards. Calmly. Carefully. Avoiding any trees as much as possible. He did not want to disturb the canopy above, and leaving the ground also meant leaving the history that was showing him the right direction, one terrible fact at a time. This was going to take forever, but for now he could only move forward, pushing slowly forward. Moving carefully, hoping the thing would eventually leave. With the canopy above, he could only guess whether it would or not. That it was all uphill now did little to help this.

He needed both hands and feet to make progress and it was slow going, trying to find handholds and letting his feet guide him slowly upward. He did not sweat, the alchemist was used to heat far beyond this and he did not consider sweating a good use of his time. Still, he was definitely feeling the heat and exertion. This cliff face was going to give him trouble, well, the alchemist had a solution for that too. He picked one of the vials that were very much not for dealing with unruly critters, but useful in this circumstance. Taking flight would expose him very easily, but there was a second option. He could feel the climbing elixir working through his veins and as if though it was little more than a gentle slope, the alchemist continued upwards, his feet and hands clinging to sheer surfaces like they had been meant for nothing else.

 

[charybdis]

Calm, indeed.

For the moment, the creature did not seem to notice its observer. Whether it was the same that had flown overhead some time before or merely an identical member of the same species was impossible to discern. It was a regal thing, this mishmash of species that had made its own creation out of the recognizable pieces. It radiated an aura of that was both divine and other-worldly that the alchemist did not need his particular talents or items to see. It was rather felt instead—like a tingle in the bones or a slight glitch in the vision that didn’t quite belong with the world around it.

Its great hooked nose dug slightly into one side, rustling the feathers and fur there in equal measure as if it was a bird preening and grooming itself. The toes stretched and slid forward on the loose ground. Slowly it lowered, falling onto its front legs with its hindquarters lifted slightly toward the sky, and stretched. A gentle mew left the corner of its lips. Then it dug slightly at the ground below it, revealing a line of pulsating silvery energy—the same, from appearances, that had powered the rune in the center of the battlefield that the alchemist had ever so recently left.

At that, it seemed relieved. The expression on its face softened and it fell to a prone position, placing itself carefully over that particular line to rest its chin against the crossed knot of its front legs. Then, slowly, its eyes drooped closed.

The alchemist pressed forward. The crinkle of the underbrush and the beginning of the incline made his going a tad more difficult, but he, as always, was prepared. He crept past the sphinx unseen, unheard, and unnoticed. At one point it did flinch, but then its head lolled to one side and it relaxed again, evidently just using the moment to regain its comfort. For now, one Darian was allowed here without interruption, note, or care and the danger was momentarily avoided.

Then came the mountain. Feet pushed against the edges of the cliff, and he climbed up edges that were not meant for mortal hold. And yet his hands and feet found purchase. Up he climbed. Up, and up, and up, and up. It wasn’t a particularly great journey in length nor verticality, and the trip was made measurably easier by the potion that the alchemist consumed. With but a slight tightening of his breath and an ever so slight measure of exertion tugging at his senses, the alchemist made it to the summit.

He could see everything from here. Perhaps that was why the god-planetar had chosen it. The silvery veins were iridescent against the sunlight, crisscrossing the island of Tur in all directions like a man’s circulation of the blood. But here they were joined. Here they were one. This was where the very footprint of peace had been made, and this was where divine became manifest. Again the feeling was omnipresent and impossible to shake—something deep and thick within the very air, filling the soul and mind and senses with each and every breath.

It was clear here. No trees had grown. Not even a rock was to be seen. The grass did not grow here. What had been made real here had burnt its very image onto the ground below and left it forever. Another great rune had been drawn into the ground in an ancient, divine tongue. Around it had been sketched the outline of a great figure that had been larger than life. One could even see all ten toes and each individual finger, along with tufts of hair that had been splayed by the wind. But the face? That too had been etched, with unseeing eyes, a thin line of a mouth, and an aquiline nose, pointed up slightly toward the air.

 

[Darian]

The alchemist stopped at the top, taking a second to catch his breath. What an alchemist needed was a quick sprint to get behind one of the many very sturdy tables in his lab when something looked to be amiss. All this prolonged walking and getting through difficult terrain was very much not something he was used to. He already felt the soreness that meant his muscles were going to complain in the morning.

That was a matter for tomorrow though. Standing up the alchemist looked around. This would be the place. This ought to be one of the weakest points, the closest the Material Plane got to the Plane of Peace. He let his eyes run along the silvery veins. A protrusion of the divine into the material or a more pronounced than usual form of leylines? Made manifest by the manifestation of the divine. Like a host body trying to get rid of some alien invader.

It would be easy to theorise. Harder to prove one way or another. He did not have any thunder jars. Nothing to trap energy itself, so he would have to make do with what he could. With careful ease he removed parts of the soil near the rune, just slivers of it. He did not need much to be honest. And then he started pulling things out of his pack. From there it was a matter of time. The alchemist had patience.

Compared to what he had access to at his lab, it was very rudimentary. A small alembic, an etheric filter, a dragonfire athanor, a few other pieces of glass- and copperware considered hardy enough to survive the journey. It was a tricky bit of work, capturing the very essence of the Peace, and then rendering it into a powder. It was not a fast process and if it worked anywhere it would work here. That was why he was doing this rather than taking samples back to his laboratory. He reduced one of the chalk pieces he had into a powder with his mortar.

He drank some distilled water and helped himself to some dried fruits while he watched the suns sink in the distance and kept working. It took time. Alchemy was not a fast process. And every step had to be deliberate. Slow. Considered. Mixing the Peace powder together with the broken up chalk he started making it back into a piece of chalk. The chalk itself was the special piece here. Ground from dragonscales, the chalk had been impregnated with a dragon's natural ability to travel between planes.

Of course, that did nothing on its own. What you needed was a compass. Something to prime the chalk, something to give it an idea of where you wanted to go. In this case: Peace. He had another set activated with pieces of Soulstone to take him back. That should get him home, but would be useless when he was already on the Material Plane. So it was time to get going.

The alchemist moved a little down the slope. Just enough to have a surface in front of him, and close enough to one of the silvery veins that it was almost touching. A little hedging of the bets never hurt, the alchemist considered. And so he started. Sketching out symbols of Srennius, the dove, the branch, the white flower, drawing them all around rectangular shape, which was the last piece he filled in. A doorway. A way into the Plane of Peace.

 

[charybdis]

From his current vantage point the alchemist was afforded a view of the island of Tur that few of mortal blood had ever been granted. It was a desolate place, having been originally covered in its untouched natural splendor before unfortunate geography had made it a focal point in the struggle between Trelore and K’Terak. Those scars that the alchemist had walked through with his touch on the threads of the past were locked into its very fabric, marring what should have been unblemished flora and fauna. A thousand, tens of thousands, of years had passed since the battles had been fought here, and yet Tur had not, did not, and would not forget.

But for now the alchemist was granted his sense of peace as he worked, with quiet settling over the space and none to mark nor disturb his chores. The gentle glitter of the silvery lines was telltale indeed; the sense of significance and that gentle aura of something other-worldly was impossible to miss, and most certainly not for the ever-alert senses that made up the dracon’s faculties. It hummed of places unseen by those locked onto the Material Plane, of energies that made up the threads of the Multiverse that were just beyond mortal comprehension.

This place was very accommodating to the alchemist’s intentions, being otherwise abandoned, quiet, and, as expected, peaceful. Packs were rummaged through, items were collected, tasks were begun, and eventually the alchemist had set up his transitory, makeshift area of experimentation. The lines drawn in the very earth had caught his attention first, and they were soon enough collected—small bits and flakes of silverly leaf, delicate enough to shatter and be blown away with the barest puff of wind. Collecting enough before it stuck awkwardly to his fingers and refused to remove or be tossed about by the moving air was the difficulty; rendering it into powder was done almost before it had been placed in with the chalk.

But the mixing of chalk and silver essence did not seem to be within either’s nature. The alchemist pressed the chalk back into small, particulate matter with his mortar and pestle. It ground into nothing more than dust. But when the pieces of the inscribed runes were scattered like glitter onto the surface, they bent and curled, seemingly trying to climb up the very sides of the mortar as if repelled by the very essence of the powder beneath it. No matter how much encouragement he tried to grant through the movements of his pestle, the two materials would not mix—maybe a smear of silver here, or a dash of powder there, but in no place in his mortar was it homogenous.

Peace, it seemed, was a very stubborn thing.

It was when the alchemist changed positions, leaving the peak to climb just a tiny measure down the incline, that he became aware that he was no longer alone. It was a hovering presence on his shoulder, a creeping feeling in his spine. Something, someone, was watching him, studying him, staring at him, from behind his back. On a crag of rock whose narrowness would have frightened many a man given the verticality of the blank space that stretched on below stood the same creature that had stood guard at the foot of the mountain just before. There was the human face, the animal’s hair, and the large paws that clung tightly onto the rock. It was watching the alchemist now—curiously, without a grace of fear in its expression, but fascinated, and most certainly not mistaken.

 

[Darian]

This was very vexing.

The science behind all this was sound. The chalk should have been infused by a dragon's ability to slip between planes, that in itself had been a lengthy and very annoying process, but bereft a dragon's intelligence, one needed a way to prime it to where it was supposed to go.

Had he had his more… precise instruments here, this would have been far easier. But this trip was already taxing enough without doing it twice. This was the best place to find the creatures. Again, the theory was sound. Distilling the essence of Peace and using that to punch a doorway through to the next plane though, that was tricky and even then purity was… well, not the best. Especially with this equipment.

The alchemist rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

Was there some lingering essence of violence perhaps that remained in the chalk? Something that acted against the Peace essence. He would need to further purify the chalk before reconstituting it… Theories and ideas were tested and discarded as he tried to force theory into practise.

Alchemy was not something that happened in an instant, testing ideas took hours. Trying to gain just that little bit of greater purity even more so. Getting rid of unwanted impurities, it all took time. Each time reconstituting the chalk as best he could, markign down the doorway, runes and all, and then testing to see if that would do the trick. Engrossed as he was in his experiments it was perhaps not a surprise that the giant sphynx managed to sneak up on him.

He gave a little jump as he noticed the thing. Right.

This was a complication.

Certainly one he did not need, but perhaps not unexpected.

Still, it did not appear immediately hostile. Which meant that it was time for plan R.

"I speak, but I have no mouth. I hear, but I have no ears. I don't even have a body, but the wind brings me life." he gave the sphynx an expectant look.

 

[charybdis]

Some things were not, however, simply scientific. It seemed that peace, or the essence, or the shadow, or whatever this fragment of power was, might possibly be one of those things. The alchemist was skilled, patient, and driven. All of these pieces of talent and ability made him a formidable foe against the constraints of nature itself. And yet the more he pressed at the chalk and the silvery threads, the more it fought him and the more immiscible the two ingredients became. It wasn’t that they were in conflict with one another; instead, the remnants of the dragon’s scales and the material from the runes simply would not mix.

The more he pressed and pushed and broke it down, the more dust-like the metallic material became. It was a frail, delicate thing, disintegrating into nothing more than particles with the slightest bit of force. Then, like opposite poles repelling their different charges, the shimmering dust would be repelled from the broken chalk and push it away in turn, creating pockets of polka-dotted silver and white that did not at all touch. Any breath of wind made the dust flutter and threaten to fly away, out of the mortar and scattered across the abandoned cliffside.

If the alchemist pushed on the silver metal to move it toward the chalk, then the chalk would move away in turn. Then if he shifted the chalk to overtake the metal, it would curl and form a ball, refusing to touch. It made for quite an odd little game, with chalk running away from dust or vice versa all around the spherical edges of his mortar and resisting even the delicate and patient hands of the well-versed alchemist.

But then the process of trial and error, experimentation, hypothesizing, and all the rest was lost in skirts of a most unexpected (although perhaps not entirely) interruption. A creature of myth said to carry the touch of the divine and the manifestation of its originating plane, the sphinx had pieces of the world it had been sent to as harbinger and herald stitched together in the most unusual patterns, making it both relatable, perhaps even recognizable, but also altogether odd. The humanoid face was ever so inquisitive, looking down at the tools in the alchemist’s hands first, and then the dust in the mortar, and then finally back up to the interloper himself when he spoke his riddle.

There was a lingering silence as the immediate answer. It stretched, filled only with the distant cries of more seabirds and the breath of the breeze taking up the space between them. Yet not for an instant did the creature’s face change from its most curious expression. If it was thinking, it didn’t show it. If it was perplexed, there was nary a sign. Instead, it appeared much as it had when it had first come across the alchemist: with a single, peculiar look on its face as it regarded the newest guest to Tur.

Then, finally, it spoke. “Words,” was said in a very simple, very clear-cut voice. Each sound was ever so carefully crafted and sliced like a tailor would make their pieces out of the most precious fabric. It tilted its head to one side for another beat of quiet. “When someone loves their land, they raise me up. When the world buffets, I get moving. I am a symbol of love and hate, peace or war. So whatever happens, just wave.”