01.149 Embarkation

Friday, June 24, 2022

Throne, The Hidden Kingdom of the Emperor

The stinging ice falling from the sky began to coalesce into larger and larger pieces of ice. Lightning flashed across the sky in spiderweb traceries.

“We need to get cover!” Zaidu yelled.

Ella concentrated, she could feel the magic in the air, this unnatural weather caused by the mixing of air and water and temperature. But it followed no conceptual framework she could manage. It wasn’t meteorology skewed, or alternate probabilities, it was… it was… something else. Ice was just appearing from nowhere, the clouds were real but weren’t. It just didn’t fit.

Ella began to breathe heavily. She couldn’t feel it, she couldn’t understand it. The hail coming down was becoming bigger and bigger. The Aqrabbuamelu had downed a few trees over several ditches and she was dragged to cover.

She could feel her rapid breath, see the cold fog coming from her mouth as the temperature continued to drop. But the molecules of air weren’t cold! Their Brownian motion was the same. Why was it cold?

She kept searching, hypothesis after hypothesis discarded. Zaidu was yelling something in her face. She couldn’t hear him, she was breathing faster and faster, her eyes glowing bright. The hyperventilation caught up with her and her vision began to narrow and she stumbled. Her chest felt tight as she couldn’t find a place to unravel this magic.

As she was about to black out, a memory, from a cave in Iceland, an elf named Reynard,

Sometimes you will come across an understanding of magic that is just the opposite of yours. You are a creature trained in logic and that will make your magic build from a foundational structure that is unassailable even to those who oppose you in the same understandings. But if their Art is different than yours enough, it will just not fit into your understanding. And so you can oppose the effects, but not the actual magic.

She broke free of the fugue she was in with a gasp of breath. And came to, just in time to see one of the Aqrabuamelu get smashed in the head with a piece of hail, large enough to pulp his head.

The sound was tremendous as the larger and larger hail struck the logs above them.

Build something to oppose the effects. Ella began to sort through the quantum probabilities until she found what she was looking for, heat. Sweat dripped down her forehead as she set the first domino to fall from so far away, a concatenation of events that would culminate into a large warm front moving into the region. It would play havoc further down with the weather, Ella could see that, but there was no choice now.

Her eyes blazed under the cover of the woods, the cacophony of hail still striking the branches overhead. All of the remaining team were under cover with only the one casualty, and everyone sat under the logs while they decided on next steps, their ears covered.

Next, Ella thought grimly. She found the vibrations of sound and stilled them, the excited state of molecules brought to a halt right where the hail struck the trees. The silence was shocking in its suddenness.

“The hail is still striking,” she called out, “I just quieted it. We need to wait for about eight hours and then it will disperse.”

They all huddled up and began plotting the next steps.

Sunday, June 26, 2022

The warm front came in, arid and dry. Ella was the butterfly of the effect, she had begun this process and now the desert like weather creeped up to them, evaporating the water from melted hailstones and drying the ground.

Bows at the ready, they made their break for it, running for a predetermined sequence of covers and breaks. As expected, arrows began to reign down from above. Orcs in the trees above had used the hail to bracket their position.

But the Aqrabuamelu were elites, one and all. They had tactical shields, bows, and managed to advance to a rocky outcropping where they grimly began the slow process of building a fire.

Fire in this world was slow to combust, lazy in its burning. Too slow for firearms, but it was still fire. And they began to burn the now dry and hot forest that ran from here to the castle, The winds that Ella had brought favored them, and the fire grew. Far slower than it would have at home, but still it grew as they kept feeding it.

Ella spent the time examining the physics of the region through magic. She could feel the slight shifts in energy potentials that caused the fire to be slow. Oddly enough, electrons shifted around just a bit easier. These were on the orders of tiny adjustments in physical law, at the very tip of her ability to sense, but they resulted in large changes.

With another long wait ahead of them as the forest burned, Ella kept reinforcing the dry hot wind. The fire needed everything it could get here and she could feel Ekerri’s magic resisting her. But the fundamentals were on her side, he had to overcome a tsunami with his unstructured and unreinforced magic.

It was the tortoise and the hare, thought Ella. And she thought about what she needed to do to capture and defuse Ekerri. Her hand went to the Dagger of Veils at her side and for a moment, she sensed another presence on the rocky outcropping with them, just the hint of a shadow, but then it was gone.

She had one very quick, very destructive, and very untried weapon in reserve. It would be messy, but as she felt it within her mind’s eye, it was even easier to bring out here. The Thousand Kingdoms were not as tethered to physical law as she had seen, and thus the weapon sat there, a looming presence.

Orc soldiers suddenly sallied forward from the smoking inferno, running for the outcropping to try and escape the fumes and make the assault happen. The Aqrabuamelu began cutting them down, arrows reigning from above in easy order.

They got closer and ran into Ella’s specialty of triplines, slicing limbs off neatly at their knees and chest at odd planes and angles. None got even near. The smell of smoke was strong, but Ella could imagine the smell of blood from the hundreds of dying orcs below. She pulled down her mask again, she needed to be cold and passionless now.

Arcsa came over to her, “we will camp a few days here at least, we want the fire to clear as many of the enemy as possible.”

Ella replied, “We will only have three. After that rains will come. Torrential rains to rebalance the weather. I can feel Ekerri, he is trying to bring them sooner, but I think it will take time to overcome all of this.”

“So be it. We will give you our rations.”

Ella looked at him sharply, “What will the soldier’s eat?”

“Where there are enemies, there is food for the Aqrabuamelu.” He gestured to the mass of orc corpses below.

Ella’s stomach clenched in revulsion. Both sides treated their soldiers with disdain, as disposable elements, as food.

But…

“I’ll eat what my people eat,” she said through clenched teeth. She needed the Aqrabuamelu loyal through acts now that they were no longer compelled. They all knew what cannibalism of this sort was to humans, so it would be a more powerful symbol for it. Her stomach turned at the thought.

“As you wish,” was all Arcsa said.