The sprawling field went on for what felt like hours without a single change in scenery, Elach looking back every handful of minutes with increasing worry on how they were going to find their way back to the cavern. There was no mountain in the distance, no beacon of light to guide them. There was nothing. He remembered a sort of tear in existence that opened up when he felt the light strike his face, a scar in reality that mostly sealed itself when he looked back at it. As if this place was explicitly designed to get unprepared practitioners lost. And unprepared he was.

Flow and Y’talla didn’t seem to share his worry in the slightest. Y’talla was utterly infatuated with the grains, working the stalks together to create a laurel that she just never seemed to be happy with, unweaving it just moments after she finished it to start anew with a sigh and a shake of her head. Flow simply stood there upon his shoulder, staring out into the distance towards a place or even Elach couldn’t fathom. Motionless. Breathless. As if they’d stepped out of their body for a moment without anyone noticing.

Endless fields of yellow. Bright yellow. Elach dipped his head to stare at his feet, the Issi of the stalks nipping at his skin and biting with the desperation of a starving animal. Annoyance slowly bubbled to the surface of his mind, the mustard yellow field’s unknown attack breaking against his resolve. And yet, something was happening. Rather, nothing was changing. The field never grew denser, nor did it thin out, the stalks as numerous as the hairs on his head. Elach turned his head once more, finding Y’talla still working on the one laurel that she had been for the past long while. He prodded at his link with her, only to find it muddled and blurry. With a raised eyebrow he did the same to Flow, and once more the link felt wrong.

Wrong, yet familiar. Elach reached down and plucked a stalk, eyeing the grain with skepticism for a moment before biting down on it. He ground it to a paste between his teeth and swallowed, closing his eyes to get a better feeling for what the Issi tried to do when it hit his stomach. After a moment, it felt like he’d eaten a lightning bolt. It smoldered and sparked in his stomach, Issi zapping against him in a cloud of smoke that reminded him of the herbs some of his village elders smoked for pain relief. Numbing and calming, yet stimulating and energizing. And an almost one to one comparison of what he felt in Flow and Y’talla’s bonds.

“The field’s attacking us?” Elach muttered in disbelief, reaching into his bond with Flow and… realizing he had no idea what to do here. Could he just push Issi through until the field lost it’s hold on Flow? And how did it catch Flow and Y’talla, but not him? Was it a manifestation thing to be more susceptible to Issi attacks? They hadn’t noticed Tomachon’s Issi worm either…

“Damn.” Elach sighed, scouring the Issi in his stomach clean before absorbing it with a hum. “How do you fight a field?”

He didn’t have any widespread techniques at his disposal to try and raze the crop. Neither did Flow or Y’talla, so getting them out of the trance this field had put them in wouldn’t help him. Maybe he could do the thing he’d done with the scrap raptors… no. His container was held together with Issi and dreams at this point, and another traumatic expansion like he’d done would spell instant death. For him.

The grain brushed up against Elach’s bare forearm, its Issi reminding him it was there. He snapped another stalk off and turned it over, looking down the hollow stalk for anything that would give him a hint. The inside shimmered with Issi, tiny interlocking scales covering every visible surface. Elach raised an eyebrow and split the stalk, exposing the scales to the artificial sunlight. An iridescent shimmer turned to a shadowy murk as the scales dissolved into liquid, a dark yellow slurry of concentrated Issi that made Elach feel awake and alert simply standing near it.

“This has to be a trap.” He said as he scraped some of the thick liquid off the stalk, raising it to his nose and inhaling the acrid, citrus-like scent. His mind reeled back at the intense assault of Issi, gagging in surprise and letting the stalk fall to the ground. “Hells that’s foul.” He coughed.

Issi grated at all his senses, overwhelming each of them in turn as it tried to overtake him. This Issi was far harder to scour clean and absorb into his container than the grains themselves, like it had burrowed in with a thousand barbed needles and screamed pain into his mind every time he tried to rip them free. He clenched his teeth and dug his nails into his palms, his hums coming out as a strained keening while he worked.

Sweat poured down Elach’s arms as he shivered, looking down at the ground beneath his knees as he came back to himself. The pain was gone, but the lingering ache of a reminder remained. Whatever this field was drawing from, it was terrifyingly powerful. The death knell of the stalk made all his muscles ache, strain, and pulse from overactivity, his jaw clenching down so hard it felt like his teeth were moments away from shattering. A field. A field had done this.

Had he accidentally wandered into one of the higher zones? He couldn’t understand how a fresh practitioner would deal with this. They’d just sit there, in a daze, until they died of thirst. Or maybe the field ate them. Made them into fertilizer. He shivered at the thought, patting the frozen Flow on his shoulder to make sure they were still there. He needed a reprieve.

“Hup.” He said as he hopped onto the cart, undoing the chains that kept him connected to the cart as he bent down to throw Y’talla over his shoulder. She said nothing, and didn’t even seem to realize that she was being moved. Her hands kept working the stalks, slowly weaving them together against his back as he hefted her up. “Up we go.”

Elach dangled from one arm two dozen feet in the air, chains wrapped around his wrist and forearm, and looked down at the sprawling field below. The… sprawling…

“What the hells…” Elach murmured, staring unbelieving down at the maybe half-mile field beneath him. It was bizarrely shaped, almost like a bowl, to give the illusion of the sprawling field Elach had seen. A half mile stretch of Issi infused stalks of grain has somehow kept with them for hours. He looked around, seeing scenery that had been hidden from him up until this point. This place was exceptionally dry, cracked earth sprawling as far as the eye could see, a fissure splitting it like a sarcastic grin. The only trees were skeletal, tissue-thin brown leaves rustling on their branches as they held on by a thread. Yet it was full of life.

A herd of Parched Earth Buffalo stampeded over the ground, churning up the earth as they went, the hard crust beaten down into soft loam that started drying out almost instantly. A stem of greenery pushed its way through before the hard earth could close over it once more, rapidly growing into a healthy tree before withering away before Elach’s eyes to one of the tall, skeletal fixtures of the wasteland. A little creature, like a mixture of a squirrel and a pangolin, with liquid blue armor scurried out of a hole in the earth and up the tree, tearing away paper-thin bark before delving into the apparently hollow plant.

That was what he’d been expecting. Not the stretch of mustard yellow hell he’d found himself in. The cart still stood, immobile, in the middle of the half mile bowl, and Elach considered abandoning it. The butcher would understand if he told them the story of this bizarre field, wouldn’t they?

Elach shook his head and sighed. Of course they wouldn’t. He’d sound like a raving lunatic, or someone trying to get out of paying his debt to the restaurant. Who gets attacked by a field? A man-eating plant, maybe. Or a tree manifestation with a grudge. But stalks of waving grains? Nobody would believe him. He chained himself away from the field, lowering to the ground near where it rose up to create an illusion. It was a sheer wall of earth, dotted with pores and stricken through with veins of mustard yellow, dripping the Issi down to the parched ground where it was greedily absorbed.

He looked around for somewhere safe to hide Y’talla and Flow, eventually settling on one of the skeletal trees with a yawning hole in its trunk. A quick check for inhabitants later, Y’talla and Flow were safely tucked away for Elach to come find once their bond was free of pollutants. A quick check assured him that wouldn’t be for a good while, and Elach chained back to the sky to retrieve the cart. He hoped it wouldn’t piss the field off too much.

“That might be the first time anyone’s thought that.” He said with a grin, hanging over the field just a moment later. “Alright; gotta get that thing airborne. No reason to waste my transcendent…”

His words were cut off by a straining noise, like wooden doors splintering under the onslaught of constant force. A grimace cut his face as one of the cart’s wheels exploded, jagged splinters cutting through stalks of grain before embedding themselves in the field’s hard-packed soil. The other wheel quickly followed, torn apart by some sort of invisible force. Ripples shot through the stalks, as if someone had thrown a handful of pebbles into a still pond, clashing with each other and drowning out the weaker ripples until only a steady pulse remained. Issi began condensing with each and every beat of the forming heart, until Elach felt a mass settle directly under the cart. It felt like some of the manifestations he’d seen before, but there was no intelligence in that pulse.

No; what Elach felt was akin to a greedy predator. A single minded instinct to consume, to sustain, to digest. To gorge themselves though they didn’t hunger, simply due to how thoroughly they enjoyed the act of consuming. The Issi spread out from the mass, shooting through the entire half-mile diameter field, filling the pores and veins with power before it pulled them back to the mass. Physically pulled. Elach watched with morbid curiosity as the stalks wove themselves into something of an amalgam, a straw doll that wasn’t quite a dragon, nor a snake, nor a bear, nor a shark. It was as if the thing below had manifested from a shared grave of the most terrifying predators on the world piece, but only found purchase in the golden grains that grew above.