Vignette- Test of Dreams 4

Manuel, Specter outside his family, crouched down staring at the water filled footprint in front of him. Carefully running his fingertips around the raised edges to feel how compact the soil was. Driving rain had turned the 10 foot long depression into a kiddy pool already. But despite that some of the edges remained fairly sharp and crisp. Rain would wear them down even faster than normal, that meant this track was recent.

Really recent.

Maybe in the last half hour. He gestured to the hunting party behind him. Directly changing their direction. You didn’t fight the stompies. They ruled these plains, while humans were merely one of the better off minor citizens. Like badgers they’d established themselves as too tough for the amount of effort involved.

Mostly.

That worked for most of the larger predators. The rexes (stompies), carno’s and allosaurus. It didn’t so much apply to the hordes of scavengers that cleaned up after the big three. Even a stompie couldn’t eat an entire diplodocus before it rotted. And that didn’t even mention some of the larger plant eating behemoths.

Either way, it was time to get out of dodge. They had plenty of meat already. Risking lives to kill a few of the endless tide of scavengers was a fools game. They’d tried for the first few years. Trying to cull the herds and keep their numbers restricted. It didn’t work worth a damn. They’d finally figured it out, after losing too many lives.

For every living dinosaur there were tens of eggs out there. What determined how many got to adulthood was the availability of food. Nothing more or less. Kill more of them and the food becomes plentiful, so more survive and you are right back where you started.

The numbers were not under human control. All that was left was finding a way to live with it. That meant sometimes hiding, sometimes killing widely to make a point. Sometimes it meant baiting hordes of scavengers into fighting each other. It was a constant struggle, but they were surviving. The hold was carefully hidden and with fairly robust, if mostly non magical, defenses. As long as they stayed, hidden in their hole they were fairly safe.

Sort of. Other than a few mushrooms it wasn’t exactly possible to farm underground. So food required leaving the hold. Sometimes for hunting, sometimes to forage for vegetables, seasonings and fruits.

Like today, sliding through the edges of the world to harvest the bumper berry crop. Just so long as the bumper berry crop didn’t lead the scavengers to a bumper human crop. Where stompies were, scavengers were sure to be as well.

A low gutteral chant rang out of his throat, audible only a dozen feet away. In tune with his chanting the hunting party chimed in, a half beat behind him, inscribed bones that lined their clothing and knotted into their hair began to release a subtle grey mist. The spirits of what once was. The calling card of evokers. The mist rose and surrounded the party, taking on the ghostly features of the previous owners of those bones. No longer did a human party walk slide through the tall grass. Instead a pack of Dilo’s pranced forward in half spectral glory.

The magic was what gave Specter his name. To evoke the spirits not just for battle, but to blend into the world outside, in sight, scent and spirit. Of course, it wasn’t perfect. Fighting over the available food supplies was not a dinosaur vs human thing. It was a everybody against everybody thing.

Just because they didn’t look like humans didn’t mean the scavengers wouldn’t jump them. The chant changed into a more driving guttural beat as spectral claws and biting jaws leapt out from the hunting party in a wave to savage the incoming pack of compys. Quickly ending their threat along with their lives, then leaving the scene. Spilled blood would attract attention, but free food was much more attractive than food that still had usable teeth.

And so they moved forward, in tune with the savage wilds, living with nature in the only way that was possible. By clawing and biting out a niche from amongst the pack.

Then with blood and bone, holding it against all comers.

Chapter 16

Twenty-two thresholds, each displaying their own unique variety of crazy. Underground fortresses with a dozen windy hidden tunnel entrances. Castles built into solid rock cliffs, resplendent with battlements and defensive towers. Tree houses made from singing tree branches into art like filigree enclosures (Even their hold was named after the skill, Treesong, so there was no way in hell they’d let some foreign blood drinking building hold their threshold!). Even one built under a lake. You had to dive in at the correct location or the piranhas would dine on fast food that day. Lots of new, visually stunning vistas. And the same boring task at each of them.

Drill Drill Drill!

If you could call an actual fight with a real risk of death a drill. It was a training exercise, easy enough to bait in a minor attack. Preferably a smaller sized pack led by a mid to low tier 2 alpha. A minor affair, considering they were expected to deal with High tier 2’s without asking for help. Even a low Tier 3 was possible, depending on the species and the size of its pack.

And yet.

Minor was a relative term. A half dozen men had died in similar drills over the last eight weeks. One from plain back luck. Nothing else you could call it when the man, despite perfect positioning and a great reaction time, caught a flying splinter through an eye. The results of an enthusiastic but appropriately aimed explosive spell. If reincarnation was real then Timothy hoped that whatever he did in a previous life to piss off the goddess of luck, hopefully this farce paid off the debt.

The other’s died to plain garden variety stupidity. Mostly standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, despite numerous reminders. A few from not so friendly fire. Training and magic helped, but there still was no good cure for the common ‘stupid’. Except maybe death. Depressing as that was.

It might not be realistic but he’d hoped for better. These were not green recruits where a few deaths were the inevitable cost of growing up. Reaching a threshold ment they were experienced men and women. They’d survived an apprenticeship in the weaker areas of the valley and moved on to bigger things. Then again, even good people could fall prey to habit or a moment of laziness.

“Move your ass behind a Tree, Mallard!” Timothy winced at Arthurs acropo ear piercing below. He fought the urge to wince again when his mind made sense out of what his ears heard. Mallard? Please, please don’t be a reference to forgetting to duck!

“Behind means on the opposite side of it from the enemy you-” Timothy shook his head tuning out the enraged slew of profanity leaving Arthurs mouth. Some people.

Still, from all reports it was paying off, calls for Regi’s help had dropped dramatically. Having the big stick in case of real, life or death emergencies was a warm emotional blanket. Nobody wanted to ruin that.

And it wasn’t all boring humdrum. The holds held a diverse group of cultures from all over the world. Ethiopian, Japanese, North Korean, South Korean, Russian, French, German, American, Canadian and more. Each of them with massively different magical styles inspired by an even more diverse set of mythologies. It was a cornucopia of ideas that he fully intended to plunder for inspiration.

On a much less directly helpful level, but almost as enjoyable, it also included culinary variety! So, no, it wasn’t all bad.

He nudged the Cardea “Watch the eddies. It’s not just the Lizards overlapping aura you have to watch out for.” He reminded them. Several of the twelve feet long lizards, thick stumpy legs and a long, horizontally flattened tail that stood them well in the shallow waters, lunged forward into the weakened area. Their own aura’s combined with a volley of spell effects to temporarily disrupt the ever present illusions. Not for long enough to reach the defenders, not this time at least. “Adjust the spell nodes back a bit, or up. But you can’t let interference stack up that way.”

“Got it. Can we use those sorts of failures as bait? Move them farther into the buffer layer so they have a smaller chance of escaping?” The masked Cardea’s voice was high pitched, smooth and with a bit of a throaty burr to it. It was a joy to listen to, honestly. Too much so. The woman could have made a fortune on a 1-900 line. And unfortunately it was proving to be a considerable distraction. He was spending entirely too much time wondering what she looked like under the shrouding robes and full mask.

Not that he was going to find out. Professionalism was a thing and sleeping with your students, even temporary ones, struck Timothy as more than a bit skeevy. That said, as soon as he was done with these damn training camps and safely back at Runehold…

He shook the thought aside with some difficulty, “You could, but I don’t recommend it. Every time you let the illusions fray you’re giving your enemy a chance to see a bit about how they work. For the low tier beasties I doubt they have the intelligence to understand what they see, but let's not get lazy. The higher the tier, the smarter the critter. Don’t get into bad habits.”

He paused, still he needed to do a bit of sandwiching, “Still, the idea of bait is a good one. I’d suggest you use the built in image creation enchantment to pull it off.”

Her husky voice had a different kind of burr to it as she responded, exasperation didn’t sound nearly as sexy. “That feature is…” She paused and her voice smoothed itself out. “Difficult to use. And even when it works it's still just a still frame. Not nearly as realistic as actual people running away.”

It wasn’t any more difficult than a dozen other enchantments she was using casually and with a great degree of skill. But a series of nods from the other three Cardea let him narrow in on the problem. Variety of magic styles had some down sides as well. Some disciplines had odd blind spots or interference with the standard threshold defenses. It couldn’t be too large of an issue, or they would never have been rated as Cardea, but idiosyncrasies were not that unusual.

“That’s unfortunate. I take it all four of you come from the same hold?” He didn’t bother to wait for their assent, once he bothered to check it was obvious. The steady beat and movement of their aura’s showed a common ancestor. Or at least a common awakener. He generally recommended that any approved Threshold pull from multiple disciplines. It helped to paper over these sorts of cracks. But saying that at this point would hardly be helpful. “Then, unfortunately, you will just need to keep practising. You may never be great at it, but with enough repetition you can achieve a reasonable degree of proficiency. Maybe not enough to make it your preferred response but having extra tools in your toolbox is worth the effort. In the meantime if you’ll allow me control for a moment I’ll fix one erroneous assumption you made.”

Despite the concealing robes she clearly stalked, in high dudgeon no less, over to a chest set into the wall. She flicked through a significant number of magical locks before sifting through the contents for a small orb. Spending another dozen seconds to activate it she stalked back to hand it over.

The orb was a temporary key and connection to the wards. A highly limited one, but situationally useful. The connection it provided was cloudy, clumsy and beset by a number of organizational barriers. The issues were not due to a lack of trust, although her walk and poorly concealed intent might indicate that as well, (just as well he wasn’t planning on getting under her mask!) but rather a limitation of the enchantments. The Cardea were, by necessity, joined to the threshold at a very deep level; they couldn’t even walk beyond the outer wards unless they broke that link, a fairly painful and traumatic experience. Re-connecting to it was similarly unpleasant and time consuming. If a simple visitor's badge could replicate that kind of soul binding then why would they bother? It was necessary to get full, articulate control of the defenses.

Still, he’d built the damn wards in the first place, even with a guest's half assed connection he could show off a few tricks. It would just take him considerably longer. He accessed the applicable illusionary feature with care, taking slow plodding mental steps to prevent fumbles. As she mentioned, it did have the limitations of still images, a regrettable result of how difficult it was to build up a detailed image. Focus on the shape, then the features, hair color, eye color expressions and skin pores. A good illusion took an obscene attention to detail. And without a great deal of help, help he wasn’t willing to hand out to just anyone, making that image move about was another order of magnitude more difficult.

Thankfully there was a fairly simple trick to it. After spending ten to fifteen minutes building up the first illusion he could use it as a reference to build a second in only two or three. All the hard work of picking out the details was done, he just shifted the stance a bit and copied over the details, then blended them into the new orientation. Rinse and repeat a dozen more times and he had a flip book of images ready to go. Throw in a few common and easy special effects between the images, flashing lights, a still shot of the chaotic background magic field, a complete bullshit spell layout of an illusion that wouldn’t work, and he had a ‘video’ of about 8 seconds in length. He paused, letting the Cardea feel the results, even as they’d followed him through its creation over the past half hour.

“I’m pretty damn good at creating illusions and it still took some serious time to build. Even with your better connection that seems to long to be useful in a battle, yes? Thankfully you don’t have to. Spend the time to create your stills like this ahead of time, then inscribe the results on a series of wooden plaques, statues, frescoes. Whatever works for you. Then from those references you should be able to pull it off in a pretty short perious of time. Maybe a minute or so. In the meantime go ahead and trigger the illusion I built up, you now how to move it around yes?“ The accent he received was grudging on one side, but they were still quick enough to start exploring his work. It wouldn’t last too long now that he disconnect himself from it, the intent wasn’t anchored to anything solid and would be worn away by the background chaos. That still left them with several minutes to work with. He handed them the guest orb back, not bothering to follow them and see where they’d place it. It showed a degree of trust he didn’t fully feel yet. But he wouldn’t be here to hold their hand in the future either and building confidence was part of his job.

He kept the sigh of relief a mental thing as the illusion of a running panicked human, interspersed with what looked like a fraying defensive enchantment ran in an unoccupied direction. Well not entirely unoccupied. There was a mess of pit traps. A good plan, he nodded along. Even though the traps weren’t terribly deadly, despite a very successful illusion. Tegu Dracaena (although dragons they were definitely not!) were too low to the ground to suffer much from that sort of trap. Less distance to fall and a center of balance that was farther back towards their long tails. Still the confusion and scrambling that ensued was a great opportunity for the defenders to pile on hits to the fast dodging not so little shits. Not that they couldn’t have done it before. This was a training opportunity after all. More about learning how to take advantage of the defensive advantages than just a simple task of killing.

But it was an opportunity all the same, and the defenders out on the grounds took advantage of it with enthusiasm. Timothy was grateful for that otherwise his ears might have further suffered from Arthurs high expectations. It also seemed like this would be the end of the exercise as Arthur gave the go ahead for a full, real attack. Not the deliberately non-lethal spells from earlier.

The local magic leaned heavily towards the nature end of the spectrum, and not the happy tree friends disney variety. The magical wave of attacks that looked like dandelion seeds floating on the wind amid a razor sharp petalstorm. It violently blew through the piled up lizards. Colorful flower petals left a mess of hair thin cuts that barely penetrated the lizard’s thick skin. But barely was still penetration and the seeds homed in on those cuts to take root. Feasting on the blood from unprotected vessels beneath the skin. The rapid growth that followed, maybe 5 minutes for the weakest, seemed to turn the lizards of unusual size into raisins. Perhaps even more disturbing was the results as less than 20 minutes later the bodies covered in now vividly blooming blood red flowers flung out their petals in a violent explosion of razor edges. Followed a few moments later by the graceful floating of another batch of voracious seeds.

The alpha, larger and better protected, weathered the early attacks with ease, but as more and more of it’s pack fell the number of flowering blood red plants grew in kind. In fear the beast at last broke and ran. Darting forward in a way that resembled Timothy’s flip book illusions. A quick dart almost too fast to see followed by a moment of stillness, rinse and repeat. But while it might dart, the away part was beyond it. Again and again its rapid movement brought it back to a flower filled meadow with seeds and petals floating about on the wind. Until even the alpha, exhausted, could no longer avoid the seeds or petals. They failed again and again to cut through or root on the thick pebbled skin, but the facial orifices did not benefit from such protections. Petals cut through the thinner transparent inner eyelids and notched the edges of its nostrils and exposed mouth. Where the petals went, seeds followed, taking root on the now exposed mucus membranes, eyes and ears. Then it was all over but for the waiting. It’s aura fought against the foreign magic, reducing the speed of growth and even crushed a few plants entirely, but for every plant crushed, slowed or ripped out, another ten took root.

At last silence returned to a meadow covered in small hillocks surrounding a larger central hill. All covered in a carpet of colorful, vibrant flowers gently swaying on the evening breeze.

“The Cardea are back on track. They’re a bit prone to taking the easy route but there is good material under all that arrogance. They’re ambitious and proud. That can be a bad thing, but it can also be good. Now that they see the problems and know that others have already mastered the things they’ve been slacking on, their own pride will force them to shape up.”

“I’m about done as well.” Arthur rumbled, taking a drink from a wineskin, although considering Arthur’s character and the fact that they were trying to be examples for the locals he should probably call it a waterskin. “This really should be one of the stronger thresholds, defensively at least. Their magic is a bit lacking in the rapid kill department, but it’s fantastic for slowly grinding down their prey.” Timothy shuddered slightly, those carnivorous flowers were something else alright, but Arthur kept speaking. “Did you know the flower bulb is one of their main food sources? If there are no enemies nearby to cause the petal explosion the petals and seeds will wilt, leaving behind the highly concentrated essence of the beast the flower fed on.”

Timothy shuddered again, even stronger. “Ya, let’s eat a flower that consumes animals from the inside. Great idea! Just make sure you don’t miss a seed.”

Arthur snorted, “The seeds are inert unless they get an initial magic charge.”

“I know that! But they still give me the willies.”

“You like cheese don’t you? You know the milking hogs from paradise feed on kills along with vegetation right?”

“Arthur, I know it’s illogical and I’m working on it. But pretty flowers killing and eating animals then exploding into more seeds in a chain reaction just causes a visceral reaction in me. I realize that domestic hogs do the same thing on a slightly longer scale. Eat, give birth, grow, rinse, repeat. Hell we all do it, but watching it happen in such a short time scale is terrifying!

“Well, as to that, I can’t disagree. The thought of them losing control of it and it whipping out the whole town has occurred to me. Thankfully it occurred to them as well, or they would likely no longer be here.”

“Ya, those little blue bell looking flowers everyone wears? Seemed like a fashion statement at first. They do smell pretty nice but that's not so much the point. They are a ward against the crimson carpet. And every house seems to have a few pots of them growing. “

“I don’t think that’s its name Timothy.”

“Spoilsport.”

“Anyway, it's just as well that we’re about done here.” He reached up and tapped his temple. “I got a message. The Mayor scrounged up a few training teams to take our place and we need to head home on the double. The moonbeams are going nuts.” Frustration and annoyance filled his tone.

“Moonbeams?” Timothy scratched at his head, cycling through various groups trying to fit one to the title.

“Star gazers? Fortune Tellers? Prognosticators? Fraud’s?” That last one was mentioned beneath his breath, low enough that Timothy could pretend he didn’t hear it at least. It wasn’t a new problem. A lot of people had doubts about people claiming to know the future. More fools them. It might be a highly limited field, but what results it did get had proved themselves to be pretty damn useful. The problem was that small things slipped right by them most times. Only big events that were already decided really popped through.

A migration of hummingbirds following the same route they always followed? Easy. A flood based on rain that was currently falling? Can do! The location of an individual passel of hogs three days from now? Not a chance in hell. So if the Moonbeams, plural not singular, were all up in arms about something… Ya, Timothy was sufficiently worried already.

“That attitude might bite you one day, Arthur. They have a decent track record of success so far.”

Arthur snorted, “I’m obeying orders. My bags are packed, the guard detail has been notified and as long as you get up on time we can set off tomorrow. Should be about 6 days to a full week out. Long enough that whatever they’ve predicted will blow over already.”

In the coming months Timothy made sure to remind Arthur of his words on a regular basis.