Interlude: Rosemallow

A century ago...

“Outsiders!”

Rosemallow flinched at the vitriolic rage contained in her friend’s voice. Eskallia the Serene, Eskallia the Placid, was nowhere to be found.

She liked it.

This latest outburst was one of many over the past days. Rosemallow had watched as her friend wrestled with the feelings of anger and helplessness engendered by the sacking of her forest home. She had watched her control the great surges of emotion, watched as she regulated her breath and calmed the stormy seas within, only to erupt with no warning, overcome by a new surge of awareness, some new realization of the sacrilege perpetrated upon her people.

“I will see them pay for their misdeeds!” Eskallia ranted.

“That’s great!” said Rosemallow as she swung her mighty studded club into the wall of black scales in front of her. “But maybe you should focus on the giant snake we’re fighting right now?”

Giant was perhaps an understatement, while ‘snake’ contained only a part of the essence of their adversary. Rosemallow could see Masgret’s tiny form high above them, where she contended with the mighty triangular head of the serpentine beast, wielding blades of compressed air to lash the grasping sucker-coated tentacles it had in place of a tongue. Ani was off to the side, in the middle of summoning his flame cyclone. Shadow was… wherever it was that Shadow went during such events.

“Here it comes again!” she yelled to her distracted companion. The beast had reared high in the air, chasing Masgret towards the clouds, but now its head was plunging hundreds of meters back to earth.

Eskallia made a sound of pure disgust. “I do not have time for this.”

She raised her arms high, welcoming the gaping maw as it descended upon her. Rosemallow could hear the entirely unnecessary words of the spell Eskallia cast as she was engulfed.

Oh boy, here we go again.

She clubbed the thrashing body of the city-sized Abyssal Anaconda halfheartedly for a few minutes, waiting for the inevitable. Ani’s flame cyclone howled over the horizon and descended on the beast’s body, stripping barbed scales the size of wagons and charring the tender flesh below, but the mighty serpent scarcely reacted to the assault. Its vast body twitched several times and then went still.

“I say,” Ani yelled from where he stood. “That seems terribly sudden. Don’t tell me Eskallia did it again?”

“Afraid so,” Rosemallow yelled back. “Time to dig her out.”

Thirty minutes of arduous hacking later, Rosemallow reached her friend where she had passed out, pressed against the frozen heart of the beast like a tick on a dog. Within seconds of being excavated, she opened her eyes.

“I don’t care about the Archon’s ruling,” Eskallia said. “If I have to break every law of the Garden, If I have to grow enough to replace him myself, if I have to sacrifice my very soul, I will see justice done.”

Rosemallow turned to look back down the tunnel of snake flesh she had excavated.

“Looks like we’re headed back to the Garden.” she yelled out to the rest of her cohort.

Chapter 11: Fallen

With Magpie’s departure, Lilijoy took a moment to relax into the comforting darkness of the forest floor. Every once in a while, if the winds above blew just right, the faintest hint of sunlight would filter down, a ghostly spotlight on the gnarl of giant roots all around.

Lilijoy didn’t find sitting near the corpse of her opponent in the dark particularly gratifying. Neither did she enjoy the unpleasant sensations coming from her own burned and sliced body. Pain dampening and blocking were great, but they didn’t help with the stiff crackling sensation she got when she moved her burned face, the sensation of blood drying all down her leg, or the unpleasant odor of burned flesh and hair.

Dealing with the body would be easy enough. All she had to do was touch it and it would be gone in a few minutes. Like Magpie, Lilijoy had mixed feelings about looting the girl. There was no convenient looting mechanism Inside, at least none available to her. The bodies of animals and monsters had to be processed, which involved a skill called Harvesting. She had heard that sufficient development of the Magi portion of the skill allowed quick and easy gathering of any valuable parts. There were also various sub-skills like Skinning and Dissection that were more common.

With sentient opponents, bodies remained after combat until they were touched or otherwise disturbed, after which a timer started. Then there were a few minutes to take anything of value before the body faded, at which point any soulbound or otherwise unclaimed items would fade away as well. Soulbinding was a quality that crafters could build into items. While it was extremely convenient, even critical, to have a weapon that stayed with you after respawn, the cost was half again the value points of the crafted object. Effectively, a soulbound weapon was only two thirds as good as it could have been had the crafter put all of their VP into the intended effects.

Evidently, it was possible to build a defensive crypt around someone’s body without touching it and retain possession of soulbound items, though it was very rare to do so. What was more common was to leave the body untouched and force someone to come for their own corpse. In the Garden, these issues didn’t arise very often, but Lilijoy imagined they were all too common in Purgatory.

The most powerful items changed hands with some frequency over the years, as soulbinding could not be added retroactively. Thus the owners of exceptional items that weren’t soulbound tended to use them very conservatively. Additionally, many exceptional weapons and items were not any more durable than the material they were crafted from, as to make an item unbreakable required another additional fifty percent of the base VP. Many of the crafting modifiers worked this way, forcing crafters, or those commissioning them, to consider the additional qualities of an item very carefully.

Lilijoy had learned this much from her class, and conversations with her cohort. She debated seeing if the girl’s armor was soulbound, but in the end, she lost the chance to find out when the body faded away. It seemed that Magpie started the timer when she nudged the body with her foot.

With that distraction out of the way, she checked on the progress of her healing. Her red bar was still quite low at thirty-two points, but at least she was no longer on death’s door.

Splitting her mind was very convenient for background tasks such as healing. One of Lilijoy’s many projects was creating dedicated sub-processing units in her mind, which she was very hesitant to call subsets, to handle healing and Mana Gathering while she was otherwise engaged. She had already made considerable progress, with working prototypes that functioned about half as well as when she devoted her full attention, all while using only a small portion of her mind’s capacity. It was very useful for times like these, when she had many other issues to contemplate.

Still, I don’t want to get caught with low health if another batch of bad guys shows up. Better give it my full attention.

By the time she was finished healing, Magpie returned alone.

“They’re back there,” she said with a gesture, when she saw Lilijoy’s look of alarm. “The big one can’t move.”

Looks like Magpie’s back in form.

“She has a name, you know.”

Magpie waved her off. “It’s weird that no one else has come after us. They should have tons of people to send, even with the big battles going on.”

“Maybe they don’t know we’re here yet?”

It wasn’t impossible. It all depended on how quickly the ones they had killed respawned. And whether the wards had been triggered by the girl’s magic use. And whether the patrol had been missed.

“Yeah...” Magpie stretched the word out. “I guess, it’s looking that way. Anyway, put on your healer hat. You’ve got your work cut out for you.”

They made their way among the giant roots of the forest floor to Skria and Jessila. Both of them were wounded, though Jessila was in worse shape by far. She had taken a second arrow to her lower back and lost the use of her legs. Skria looked battered and one of the membranes between her arm and body was torn. She had the goggles from the attacker that Jess had killed perched on her forehead.

Lilijoy crouched next to Jess and started working on her right away. Insiders couldn’t block pain in the way many Outsiders with systems could, though Lilijoy knew that they could learn a similar ability called Fortitude. Unfortunately, Jess hadn’t picked it up yet, and she could see the big girl was suffering.

If anyone should have Fortitude, it should be Jess, Lilijoy though as she gathered her Prana. She sent the gentle green energy to repair Jessila’s spine, reserving just a bit of herself to listen to Skria and Magpie.

“Good thing we brought you along,” Magpie said. “Those guys in the trees would have shredded us.”

“The first one was easy. His Invulnerability wasn’t too high for my darts. The second one was strong, but he wasn’t expecting Swoot.”

Sometimes, Lilijoy suspected that Swoot had some kind of mental stealth ability. It was incredibly easy to forget the huge shadow owl was around when he was out of sight. Which was pretty much always. He had found them soon after they had begun to travel through the woods, following his bond with Skria. Lilijoy could only imagine that Averdale was something like a paradise for his species, with its huge open spaces in the perpetual dark under the canopy.

“So what’s the deal with the goggles?” asked Magpie.

Skria’s voice got excited. “You have to try them! Watch me once you put them on.”

There were rustling sounds, and then an exclamation.

“Whoa. Well shit, that explains a lot.”

Lilijoy had to know. She split her mind further and asked, “What do they do?”

“They find people who are using Stealth. As soon as Skria faded out, she lit up.”

“I think that they were all wearing them, so we should find where the other ones fell,” Skria added.

“The girl we fought didn’t have any, or they were in her inventory. But you’re right, if we can get more of these we should.” Magpie's voice faded as she walked away, no doubt intent on finding the bodies of the men who had fallen from the trees.

“Sorry to bother you, Lily, but maybe we should use a treatment too? I’m afraid it will take too long to heal us both,” Skria said.

They each had one healing salve, all they could afford. The salves greatly accelerated the healing process, though they were far from instant cures.

“You’re probably right,” Lilijoy replied. “Just let me try something first.”

An idea had come to her as she was healing Jess and listening to the others. When she wanted to use two different mana types at the same time, she pulled the mana from her core onto spindles and wove them together. If she pulled Prana onto two spindles and split her mind, could she heal twice as fast?

She had known for a while that only one narrative consciousness could access her mana core at a time, much as only one consciousness could run her body at a time. When she was juggling multiple types of mana, she subdivided herself gently, in a form of enhanced multitasking. It hadn’t occurred to her to split herself completely for the spindles, as mana weaving wouldn’t work well with two separate minds; it would be like two people tying one shoe.

She ran into a problem right away. The amount of Prana she could pull from her core was a bottleneck, limited by her Healing skill. It was easy to fill two spindles, but it took twice as long. She almost abandoned the idea there, but the possibility of keeping the valuable salves in reserve beckoned, and she persevered.

Once she had two spindles of Prana, she found the next issue. Every time she tried to merge the threads from the spindles into one double-strength stream, the Prana from one spindle would flow back onto the other, like a short circuit. To solve this, she split her mind further and sent one thread down the left side of her body and the other down the right. With this technique, she was able to heal two areas of Jessila’s body at the same time, one per hand. By this point, she had realized that another subdivision of her mind might be needed to move her hands, as she hadn’t yet learned how to subdivide her motor cortex.

There was a certain structure to the whole arrangement that hinted at possibilities for future growth, and it was rewarding to find a single task that stretched her mental abilities. Over the past couple weeks, she had realized that her mind had far more power than she knew how to use.

It’s like I have a mansion, but the only furniture I own is a chair, she thought. I need to figure out what to do with all of the extra space.

Splitting herself into Lilijoy and Jiannu was certainly a start, as were her ongoing experiments with multitasking and creating long-term dedicated subdivisions. But the idea that she could create structures out of these units, develop architectures of mind to increase her power in the world, that felt both new and right.

She continued to heal Jessila with both hands until her mana hit fifty percent, which was only about a quarter of what was needed. Still, she had repaired the spine, and made good progress on the gaping hole through her shoulder.

“Guess we’re going to need to use a treatment after all,” she admitted to Skria.

***

It was another twenty minutes before they were moving again. Magpie had found one more pair of goggles, and she and Skria had experimented a bit, trying to determine their best strategy, now that they knew the enemy might be able to see through their stealth.

“It’s not as bad as I feared,” Magpie whispered as they made their way along a particularly huge root. “Once you know about the goggles, you can kind of stealth your Stealth, if you know what I mean. It’s just one more thing to juggle. Skria can’t do it, but you should go up ahead a little and see if you can hide from her.”

After some trial and error, Lilijoy figured out how to hide her Stealth mana from the goggles. Unfortunately, it meant that her overall ability to remain undetected diminished considerably. She didn’t feel too bad about that though. Jessila had been ignored in the initial attack by the patrol, and it was probably due to the fact that she wasn’t using Stealth at all, relying instead upon the Cloak of Shadows.

The other problem, if it was a problem, they were all considering was the total lack of opposition. Far-off explosions and the occasional distant scream or metallic clash let them know that the larger battles were still underway, but none of them could come up with a good reason why a larger force hadn’t been sent out after them. It was increasingly likely, approaching certain, that at least one of the four people they defeated had already respawned.

Respawn times were quite random, though affected by the death counter. The best anyone had been able to figure out was that each previous death could add anywhere between a minute and an hour to the respawn time, though the shorter edge of the range was most common. If the four members of the patrol were still riding the white after nearly an hour had passed, then Lilijoy and her cohort were fortunate indeed.

Since first deaths and Academy deaths were instant respawns, Lilijoy had yet to experience a waiting period. She had heard that it was extremely annoying, that there was no timer or countdown to let you know how long it would be. Veterans called it ‘riding the white’, for reasons Lilijoy assumed she would understand when it inevitably occurred to her in the very near future. The bundle of mana in her stomach from the small sphere she had swallowed earlier served as a constant reminder of that. It was her primary respawn method to prevent capture, a bundle of explosives and poison that could be triggered with a thought, and it was called, aptly enough, a death-wish.

Death-wishes had been supplied for all of them by Magpie’s trainer; they were hardly the kind of thing available for purchase in town, even if they had the gold to do so. Lilijoy wasn’t putting all her faith in a single method, but the death-wish currently inside her was her first and best option when the time came.

The trunks around them grew larger and the canopy above them more distant as they neared the center of the forest. Skria climbed to the very tops of the trees several times as they progressed. Each time she returned back to the rest of the group, she looked more serious, though she didn’t speak until the latest. That time she whispered to them.

“We’re in the right place. The Top is just ahead. Most of the fighting is past the Burdened.”

The basic layout of Averdale, post-Sinaloa, was no secret, not with the many Insiders who could easily fly above it. The Top was the part of the Greatwood that had fallen, over six hundred meters of colossal trunk and branches that lay across the surrounding lesser trees. When the arcane explosives planted by Sinaloa tore through the trunk, they were unable to penetrate the heartwood, so the massive upper portion remained attached to the base well over three hundred meters above the forest floor.

On the other side of the Greatwood trunk was the Burdened, a sister tree that had grown into and supported the lowest bough of the Greatwood. Lilijoy remembered that branch of the city-tree well; it was called the Bough of Burdens, the first part of Averdale she had witnessed in her vision at the mystic library.

They walked just a few minutes, and the perpetual darkness of the forest floor began to lift. A little farther, and they could see small patches of light ahead of them. At last, they reached the Top, where the ancient damage to the canopy from the falling Greatwood had yet to heal.

In the back of her mind, Lilijoy had expected a scene of desolation befitting the great cataclysm of destruction that ended the Greatwood’s reign, but over the last century life had dressed the grave of the fallen in color, as if the forest had laid flowers upon the tomb of its king. Dangling strings of orchids fell amid a thick cover of flowering vines, hiding the wooden bones from unworthy eyes. Her gaze was caught by the luminous hues of a thousand blossoms, and only reluctantly could she drag her eye along the line of the fallen trunk, see it ascending through the boles of its honor guard, stretching up and into the distance, where perspective was caught by the widening wood to make a straight and constant avenue to the sky.

She could hardly breathe from the combination of beauty, majesty and tragedy that filled the air, for beyond the fallen Top stood what remained of the Greatwood. Her internet memory triggered as she searched for a comparison that could make sense of what stood in the distance.

It’s like Devil’s Tower.

And it was, perhaps crossed with a towering building of the sort once found Outside. She could only see part of it, due to the remaining canopy around them, but the sight nearly stopped her heart. Above it, birds wheeled and soared, and when she saw the bursts of fiery color beneath them and the rumbling of distant thunder, she realized that they were Avians, dropping bombs and casting spells upon their enemy.

She turned to Magpie and whispered, “We’re going to go into that?”

“That’s the plan. Made a lot more sense back at the Academy, eh?”

She didn’t have a response for that. “Where should we go now?”

“Tricky… “

As Magpie was thinking, Lilijoy heard the sound of distant voices. “Shh, Listen!”

Magpie cocked her head. “I hear it. People talking, about… five hundred meters away, ground level?”

“I agree. Think it’s people looking for us?”

“Doubt it. Sounds conversational, too sloppy for a response force.”

“Who would be out for a walk with all the fighting going on?”

“I don’t know. You want to find out? Maybe we’ll learn something.”

Lilijoy looked over at Skria and Jess, who were in a hushed conversation of their own. She caught Skria’s attention, and soon the cohort was huddled together. She filled in the pair, as neither of them had hearing that compared to hers or Magpie’s.

“I’ll go in the trees,” said Skria. “It won’t take long at all for me to get there and come back.”

“You can’t use Stealth,” Lilijoy reminded her.

“I don’t have to get that close. If they’re on the ground, I’ll be above them anyway. Most people don’t look up very often.”

Lilijoy didn’t feel great about separating, but it seemed like the best solution. It was either that, or forge on into the heart of Averdale, which felt altogether too risky now that they were on the brink.

Skria vanished up a tree trunk. In just minutes she was back with her report.

“There were six of them, no weapons or armor to speak of. They were talking about their families Outside and making quotas. I think they were gathering fungus from the forest floor.”

“Did you get close enough to scan?” asked Magpie.

“Just one of them who went off from the others. She was an open bloom, level six, sixty health. She had a weird name too, Recolectora2166. Maybe it’s some Outsider thing.”

Magpie raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like a bunch of serfs.”

Recolectora meant ‘gatherer’ in Spanish. Lilijoy thought of Mister Sennit, whose first name was Weaver. She realized she didn’t know his Outside name.

He probably doesn’t tell people in order to protect his family. I wonder what name I would have if a clan chose it for me. Probably ToiletCleanerGob88 or something.

“We should follow them. They probably know how to get in without triggering any wards,” she suggested.

Magpie looked skeptical. “I don’t know. I’m sure they pass through a ton of live and passive security. They may carry some kind of token that lets them through warded areas.”

“What if we asked one of them? Skria said Recolectora2166 went off on her own. We could capture her and see if she was willing to help.” Even as she said it, Lilijoy knew it wasn’t a great idea.

“Charm,” said Jessila.

The contribution to the conversation caught Lilijoy by surprise, from its source and from its content.

I guess she knows better than anyone how powerful it could be.

“That’s not impossible for me,” said Magpie. “But if it doesn’t work, we’ll have to send her to respawn. That won’t feel great.”

Jessila gestured to Lilijoy. “She can do it. Trick the Outsider.”

Skria jumped in, “Oh, I know!” The others hushed her and she continued in a whisper. “She can pretend to be a lost goblin or something.”

“Forest spirit,” said Jess.

Lilijoy looked up at her friends, amazed at how quickly she had been volunteered to deceive and beguile poor Recolectora2166. She glanced over to Magpie, but found no help there.

“It’s no crazier than any of the rest of this. Sure, why not?” she said with a shrug.

***

“Young human.”

Maria let out a startled gasp. She had seen many things since her masters sent her to this alien world of dreams to gather mushrooms from a dark forest floor. The great lords of Sinaloa wielded powers beyond imagining, powers which controlled the very fabric of her reality. Even their servants, such as her overseer, could summon flame and cause the very earth to move.

Others had whispered that it was all something called El Sistema de Sueños, but if it was, she had never been able to wake up on her own. It was only when her overseer ordained that she had met her quota that she was allowed to return to her emaciated body and visit the waking world, to see her mother and her sisters.

During her years in the dream world, she had experienced all manner of strange things. The lords had granted her the ability to see in the darkest night, so as to better serve. She had seen horrible creatures in the dark of the giant trees, great glistening masses of ooze that moved like waters she had splashed with her hand to envelop and consume their victims. Sticky hooked ropes that lashed from far above to capture and drag their screaming prey into the great leaf ceiling. Every journey to perform her duties was an endless night of terror, though in truth, such occurrences were rare.

But this was the first time she had been addressed by the forest. She froze, hoping that it was only her imagination, that the stress of her life was causing her mind to play tricks. She could hear the others talking some distance away. Too far away.

“Young human of Sinaloa.”

This time, the voice was more present, though still little more than a whisper. It called the name of the great clan of her masters. She had no choice but to reply.

“This one is not worthy of that name.”

Silence fell.

Then a being emerged from the darkness.

“Alux,” she whispered to herself under her breath. Her mother had told her stories of the little people of the forest, whispered warnings of their anger over the loss of the great trees that once covered their land. Now she understood that the little people, the alux, had come to this world of dreams, where the forests still stood.

“Be at ease,” said the alux in a soft voice. She felt a wave of peace and contentment wash over her.

“What is your name, human?”

“Maria Mendez,” she replied, amazed that her voice did not tremble.

“Well, Maria,” said the tiny being. “I would like to ask you a few questions.”