Mutatis Mutandis [Finn]

[Imogen]

Frost 82, 124

Imogen was a great believer in formalities, but not in pageantry- she found public attention to be uncomfortable, which was one reason she had avoided staying long in Drathera after the events at Agst'rasera. Still, she found herself compelled by matters of security to send a letter to Lonelyblade and the Shield Legion prior to her visit. Though she planned her trips within the Commonwealth to avoid attracting Kegumu Rekaka to any heavily-populated area, who could say what would happen on any given day, in any given moment? It would have been terrific negligence to simply slip in unannounced.

Achaka was no gossip, of course, but the news got out. Rumors spread around the city of the impending return of the Great and Ancient Witch, and with rumor came story and speculation both.

The stories were fabulous, in every sense of the word. Tales circulated that Ynnogen had returned from self-imposed exile in Ailos (or Kythera? Nobody seemed totally sure where she was supposed to have been all this time) to aid the Commonwealth. Some said that she was a spirit, twenty thousand years old, conjured by Achaka's aide-de-camp to bolster the army, or else to purge the land of the plague which had continued its creeping spread. It was said that she had saved the seasons from destruction, that she was one hundred feet tall and wore a cloak stolen from Death, and that the Silent Fisher stalked her wherever she went to steal it back. Stories claimed that the Great Witch had defeated the Primal of Fire by wresting a river out of its banks and flooding it out; one particularly outlandish rumor held that she had saved the remaining Dawnmartyrs by picking up a monster-filled mountain on Ailos and throwing it across the ocean to crash safely in the jungle.

Fabulist rumor was a curious bad habit for a country which worshipped the God of Truth, but the more intriguing thing was that Drathera's officials seemed to take the visit quite seriously. There was much speculation in the halls of the Senate as to the purpose of the visit, and even some of the Senators expressed hope that perhaps the Great Witch had, in fact, found some kind of cure for the scourge of the diseases running rampant. It was a state secret of sorts, but many of the Senators knew that Imogen herself was one of the very first to be afflicted with Aether Creep. The fact that she had somehow survived the disease for almost two years... well, that had to be some kind of miracle, didn't it?

Other Senators speculated that the purpose of the visit was not about curing the disease, but about the particular medicine they were negotiating for. The Great Witch was known to be close friends with the dragon Deravaecia of Iron, who yet remembered the old Solunarian wars of conquest and spoke bitterly of the follies of relations with the Commonwealth's desert neighbor. The dragon had few friends in Drathera--some ancient feud with Achaka kept her from even entering the same building as him--but those who worried that the ground was shifting under their feet clung to the hope that perhaps Ynnogen would address the Senate on the matter.

~~~

For herself, when Imogen arrived in Drathera, she took up in the Senate's guest-house at the top of the city and sent for Deravaecia- but she didn't do so right away. She wasn't even aware of the Solunarian embassy, and easily ducked every Senator who attempted to meet with her over this issue or that cause. The witch wasn't in the city long, and she had no intention of letting the Senate trap her into another week-long daze of addresses, celebrations and fruitless debate sessions. They had already ruined two of her trips, and she would be damned if they got another.

(She was aware, of course, of the spread of the Aether Creep throughout the kingdom. Alas, the regimen she had used to treat her own case did not scale, perhaps not even to a single other person. She consented to meet with a few people on the matter anyway, on the off-chance that her own discoveries would prove helpful.)

In the main, however, she decided to spend the week enjoying herself. With the gift of Traversion, it was easy enough to visit her old haunts throughout the city without spending the entire day walking the Stair, and she'd promised Ansel, Tilman and Aurin that she'd bring them all something from Drathera the next time she visited. For the first two days she simply haunted the shops and inns of Drathera, buying trinkets to stash away and finding exotic animals to introduce to Kitty.

On the third day, however, she did not leave the plateau at Drathera's height, but instead went to watch the Shield Legions and the Arbiters as they drilled behind the Temple of Raxen. From the marble dais set up for public view, the witch sat for hours, observing hundreds of swordsmen as they went through the motions of battle, from rude apprentices to monks who had dedicated their whole lives to swordcraft.

Kitty draped himself over her as she observed the drills, snoozing in the midday sun. It wasn't Searing yet, but it was hot in Ecith, and hotter still with a three hundred pound cat on your lap. Thankfully, the blessing of Searing kept her comfortable throughout, even as her own meditation turned occasionally into napping. There, with no activity or responsibility, no jobs or life-threatening dangers, just watching the practices with her cat... the Great Witch felt truly relaxed for the first time in almost two years.

[Finn]

It didn't get all that cold in Ecith, even in the winter months. It was cooler, though, and so for much of Frost, Finn had taken Achaka up on his invitation to train under the eye of Raxen's Temple.

Finn had been an indifferent swordsman in Kalzasi, knowing enough not to hurt himself and to be able to defend himself should the need arise. He hadn't been a soldier, or even a warrior, really. That had changed when the Zaichaeri thugs had cornered him one night without a blade, broken him and his lute. He hadn't let the Assessors erase the trauma. Dealing with it made him stronger—physically, mentally, and emotionally.

He had since thrown himself into becoming better able to defend himself and those he loved. His early training as a blacksmith had trained his body a certain way, and the time spent swinging steel had added bulk that plucking strings had not.

Today, he was sparring with a frequent partner, the young Karmordi. The ork was a berserker, and they had been teaching each other a thing or two.

Another sparring pair rolled their eyes and shifted farther away, as Karmordi and Finn tended to get messy. Just then, Karmordi knocked Finn's pact blade out of his hand. Rather than let it land so far out of reach or, worse, harm someone unintentionally, he pulled its essence back into himself, screaming a challenge at the still-armed ork, or perhaps just to drown out the pain of dematerializing a pact weapon without meditative preparation.

His opponent rushed forward, two-handed blade held high over head. Rather than run or spin another blade out of himself, Finn bum rushed the ork, still roaring back. It devolved into wrestling and trying to pound each other's heads into the flagstones and similar.

Later, after they had worn themselves out, they departed to clean up and see to wounds.

Eventually, Finn appeared, nodding politely to woman and cat before taking a seat on the dais, far enough away that she needn't engage with him if she didn't choose to. He was calm now, clearly weary, but watched the other fighters with interest. He had fresh bruises and cuts, as well as various scars. There was a Sentinel back at the Prædium who would go over the first aid with necromantic skills, and all of his scars were slowly fading lest Arvælyn see them and declare war upon the Commonwealth.

[Imogen]

Imogen appeared to be snoozing when Finn took his seat, her chest rising and falling in the rhythms of sleep. From his remove, the gentle snrk-hork-snrk of her soft snoring was just barely audible.

But as soon as Finn turned his attention away from the spectator area and back to the field, Kitty stealthily unhooked himself from his mistress' seat and began to pad quietly over towards the man, absolutely intent on discovering if he had any snacks the jungle cat could beg, borrow or steal. Thankfully for the unwary Dux, the shifting weight woke Imogen up.

"Kitty!" she hissed at her familiar, "Get back here! Don't bother the nice man."

"Mrow?" the cat said, plaintively, staring at her with his huge golden eyes. When her stern face did not relent, he sighed, slinking dejectedly back to his perch.

"I'm so sorry." The witch apologized to Finn in her bright Zaichaeri accent, "He isn't normally this restless." She frowned as she lay eyes on the man. It wasn't his race--Drathera was cosmopolitan enough to include mixed crowds wherever you looked, even if the green skin predominated--but something about him caught in her memory. She went quiet as she scrutinized him for a moment... then brought one balled fist into an empty hand as she realized what it was.

"Oh! You're the duelist from earlier. I remember, I was having a hard time placing your style. A couple of your strikes look like evolutions of the Arbiter's Third, which is a Kalzasaern innovation, but your guards are throwing me off. Did you study in Silfanore, maybe?"

She hoped he had- she'd toured most of the continent and seen the stylings of warriors from across the whole of the realm, but her knowledge of the practices of Sol'Valen and the Hytori remained largely theoretical. There were few elves in Zaichaer or Gelerand, only scant few more in Ecith, and while there were plenty of Hytori and their subsidiary races in Kalzasi, but few of those ever had any actual roots in the ancient kingdom's borders. As a result, she simply couldn't say with any authority that she'd actually *seen* an elvish swordsmaster at practice.

It was a hobbyist's curiosity, of course, but more than that. The way in which a nation chose to practice the sword revealed a great deal about that nation, its priorities, its evolution. It was much of why Imogen had been coming here, to watch the sparring- to understand how the Orkhan had chosen to interpret Raxen.

[Finn]

When Innogen woke up, Finn was kneeling with his hand outstretched for the shadowcat to sniff, but she arrested that development.

"Oh, I don't mind. I was going to give him a treat if that won't offend?"

The hoi aristoi of Kalzasi and Solunarium both had specific feelings and expectations around other people's behavior with their pets and animal companions, and he certainly didn't want to offend. There was also the sense he got that this was not a naturally-occurring—at least in Ransera—creature so he didn't want to give it something that would cause it harm. He had a small portal open to the Prædium's larder and was just going to reach in and feed the creature a steak if he was allowed, but he was an ambassador now, so he would only do so if it would be accepted by all as a gesture of goodwill.

The Zaichaeri dialect didn't faze him now. He had gone to the city on his own power, snatched Lyra's daughter out from under their Order before they could discover her. Fear was no longer his knee-jerk reaction to the jackboots of the Brass City.

"Ah..." He quickly devised as concise a curriculum gladii. "I learned the basics in Kalzasi, the more advanced in Solunarium, and now Karmordi and the others are teaching this old dog some new tricks. I've tried to train against as diverse a group of fighters as possible when given the opportunity. I may not win any awards for style, but hopefully I will always have a trick up my sleeve to keep my skin." He grinned.

Finn wasn't a blademaster, but he was quite good. Of course, in Solunarium, that meant he was bad.

And, if he was successful brokering a peace between Solunarium and its enemy, Ecith, perhaps he would be sent to Silfanore next. That was a bright thought!

"I'm Finn," he said simply. He had titles and all, but those didn't belong here.

[Imogen]

Kitty stopped as soon as Finn said the word 'treat', his ears perking up and his head jerking up to look at Imogen. His golden eyes were pleading.

"...fine." she told Kitty, "You can eat whatever he's willing to give you. But don't eat his shadow, okay? We can't have another incident."

The big black jungle cat skidded into action, his feet pushing ineffectively against the ground for a few seconds before he jolted back to Finn's side, gazing up at him with eyes like saucers. At this distance, however, Finn could clearly see the signs of the supernatural- that Kitty's black hue came not from the color of his coat per se, but from shadows flowing in and around every hair. Shadow pooled around the big cat's legs as he tried to adopt a regal posture.

Imogen's ears, meanwhile, perked up a little as Finn explained his training history. Silfanore it was not, but Solunarium was a name she'd heard more than a few times over the years without ever seeing hide nor hair of their fighting style.

"Solunarium? Let's see, that's only on the other side of the continent... but I don't think there's been significant cultural mingling in recent memory. the Ork brought up a hand to rest her head against as she thought aloud, "The style practiced in Drathera is a relatively pure form of the style created by Lord Raxen, though only the Arbiters can claim real mastery of it. When he led the conquest of Ecith, their style largely supplanted the more primitive soldiering of the armies of the God-Kings and God-Queens, with the obvious exception of Ailos. That came to Karnor through the Avialae and the Dawnmartyrs."

"Most of Karnor practices Gelerian styles, which are themselves derivative of the northern raiders. But Solunarium... came from..." Imogen's brow furrowed. When it came to anything unrelated to fighting, she was an inattentive student of history. Did she know anything about Solunarium? Not really. But she was certain it wasn't derivative of either the Gelerand styles or Raxen's arts.

"Well, I have no idea, actually. Therefore, your style is wholly foreign to me! Mr. Finn, I must ask you to do me the honor of letting me see you drill-"

Imogen's earnest request was interrupted as a man approached the two spectators; it was, in fact, Karmordi. The young ork looked uncharacteristically nervous, glancing between Finn and the woman. When he noticed that she had broken off talking to watch his approach, he flushed visibly. The ork cleared his throat, blinked a few times- then got down on his knees.

"I am sorry for interrupting, Finn..." Karmordi began, "But I fear I will get no other time to ask this of Ynnogen, and this is important to me. Please, Great and Ancient Witch- teach me how to slay a Primal!"

There was a moment of awkward silence. Even thought Karmordi was on his knees, Imogen had to crane her neck up to look at him, so much taller was he. She frowned, her brows drawing close together.

"What? No." Imogen finally replied, sounding annoyed, "Kid, have you seen a Primal? They're huge! Don't fight them. Just get out of the way."

Karmordi looked like he'd just been slapped in the face, but he had a warrior's spirit. He gathered himself quickly, and tried again: "Ynnogen... with the Chieftains gone, we lack the strength of the heroes of old. Only one power remains which can replace them. They say you have fought two Primals and driven them to flee- I beg you, teach me how."

"I've got maybe three more days before I have to leave the city." Imogen responded. She sounded a little less annoyed, having heard his conviction, but was plainly no closer to agreeing to his absurd request. "You know what happens if I give you pointers for a couple days and you go swing your big sword at the Queen of Kythera? There's about thirty thousand ghosts in the Imperial Marches who can tell you more!"

[Finn]

"From what I gather, most styles of combat practiced in Solunarium are based either upon the Hytori styles brought by the Re'hyaen elves when they quit Sol'Valen, the practices of the Vastian tribes who lived in the Atraxian Expanse when they arrived, or both."

Finn pulled a steak out of the larder via his small portal and offered it to Kitty; if Kitty only wanted the steak's shadow, he would find that odd, but would not tell the shadowy cat what he ought and ought not to eat. He kept a close eye upon his teeth, though, as he didn't want to lose his shadow. It reminded him of the saga of the Fae'ethalan Pan, who lost his shadow and had to catch it and stitch it back to his body.

From his crouch, he looked over his shoulder to smile at his erstwhile sparring companion.

"Should you be battling primals?" he asked carefully. "Weren't they put into place by Aedrin to maintain the natural balance?"

And he was certainly going to have to ask for more clarification about the Great and Ancient Witch Innogen, but probably from other sources. There were some questions he might ask the woman directly; as for the rest, he didn't doubt Karmordi's honesty, but his symphony rang with hero-worship and that meant he was far from unbiased.

"Unless they are Voidborn shadow primals clawing their way into the world during an Eclipse," he added quietly, rubbing at his shoulder. His arm had been perfectly reattached and physical therapy brought his control back back entirely as well, but he felt a phantom throb remembering the trauma.

The Assessors always wanted to erase that, but he wanted to process his own trauma, and emotional scars reminded him what he had survived, even as physical ones did. But his physical scars would fade so he could seem more perfect as the husband of the crown prince of the Umbrium.

[Imogen]

Kitty, it transpired, would eat pretty much anything. He did start with the steak's shadow, but after gulping that down he moved on directly to the meat itself. The motions the cat made while eating were precisely identical in both modes of consumption, which didn't bother Imogen but did make her wonder. After all, if a material creature could choke down a shadow, did that mean there were shadow monsters which could eat real creatures too? A concerning thought.

But her mind was moved away from that by Karmordi's pleas, and then by the human's words. As she turned them over in her mind, Karmordi turned his earnest face back to his sparring partner, shaking his head emphatically.

"No, the Primals are Aedrin's gift, and a test to the people. Since time immemorial, the greatest heroes of Ecith have vanquished Primals and taken their power in turn, to use to guide and guard their villages." The young Orkhan berserker paused, not wishing to give his guest and friend the wrong idea, "There are some few who worship them as Aedrin's harbingers, who say it is sacrilegious to defy them. But the old ways which preserved the Orkhan for thousands of years say otherwise."

Imogen yawned, plainly uninterested in Karmordi's telling. "Lord Aedrin doesn't concern himself with tests of virtue. You've got the wrong Dragon God in mind."

"Still!" Karmordi protested, "You cannot deny that the practice has been the foundation of the Commonwealth!"

He had a point, of course, but it did nothing to invalidate her own objection. Even if the kid could convince her that he was a worthy champion of the people, destined for greatness and a hero in the making, she couldn't realistically confer upon him the power to seize that destiny in 72 hours. As she sought for the words to let the boy down gently, Finn spoke again- this time about the voidlings. For a moment, she was confused; what did they have to do with anything? Then a light came on in her brain.

"Actually, the beasts of Nyxus are sort of the opposite of Primals." she pointed at Kitty, "Or, rather, the opposite of him. You see, Aedrin's power flows through the earth, suffusing the world with its elements... except that, in Ecith, the mechanism is warped. In the distant south, it over-aspects creatures like Kitty here into whole species of half-elementals. In the Commonwealth, it builds endlessly into vast and terrible monsters."

"By contrast, in Shaeoth's realm there is so little aether that the creatures within starve endlessly, hungering for the leavings of the higher planes."

The witch said all of this in a very matter-of-fact tone of voice, sounding distracted as if she were pulling wayward strands of hair out of her face. Karmordi was instantly lost, having absolutely no grounding in any kind of planar or elemental theory (just one more reason to doubt his qualifications as a Primal-hunter). After a moment, he realized that he was in real danger of losing the momentum in this conversation.

"Either... way, I still intend to slay a Primal."

"Mmm. Well, then my advice is to go after one of the really big ones."

Karmordi looked surprised. "What? Why?"

"They might not notice you trying to kill them, and you'll have a chance to get away afterwards."

[Finn]

Finn had been given some instruction in magical theory by the Sentinels, but had also battled voidspawn and so he followed most of what Innogen was saying, filing away questions he would ask other Sentinels later rather than show the gaps in his education—at least how many there were. He could still ask questions and learn while he was here. Any edge over voidspawn was worth admitting some ignorance.

While he wasn't sure Karmordi should be attempting combat with a Primal anytime soon, he also didn't want to quash the young Ork's dreams.

"Are these differences in the mechanism intentional on the part of Lord Ædrin," he asked slowly, "or are they differences we can fix to bring Ecith more into alignment with His will?"

There was a reason the draegir and moritasi were more active in the lives of mortals; they weren't so far removed from mortality despite being functionally immortal. While he didn't understand the will of Aværys entirely, it was something he could ken in general terms, whereas Ædrin was almost more concept than person in terms his mind could hold.

As for Karmordi's quest, "Even the most ferocious of ants remains an ant compared to an oliphaunt, I suppose. But it seems to me defending the people from the voidspawn proves one's resolve more than chasing Ædrin's children for glory." To soften the opinion, he laughed in self-deprecation. "But what do I know? I just married up."

That said, he fell silent, hoping to learn more from this interaction.

[Imogen]

"Plllbbbpptt..." Imogen blew air out between her lips and shrugged, "Search me, what Aedrin wants."

As far as the witch knew, no mortal had ever spoken with Aedrin, although perhaps the Librarians knew better. Few of the mightiest of the Dragon Gods ever intervened in mortal affairs, and though she was aware of all the theological (and practical) arguments for why, it seldom sat quite right with her. Luckily, she was absolutely sure that Aedrin, to the extent he knew any of them existed at all, did not care what she thought of him.

Still, there was no doubt that some power of nature wanted the matter changed. Otherwise, who was paying her, and why?

But she wasn't about to bring that up in public. It was a basic tenant of the Coven, and of any professional business; you don't discuss your clients. Even if your clients were strange, inhuman courts of elementals who communicated only in metaphor and had inscrutable directives.

Luckily, Karmodi stepped in again. "I did march against the Voidspawn as the Eclipse shadowed the land, Finn, when Lord Raxen gathered the Sword Legion to cleanse the lands."

Had it not been for the magnitude of the celestial threat afflicting the world, the fact that Raxen had led men in battle again would have been the biggest news of any Ork's life. Since the retirement of the Triumvirate, Raxen had disturbed his seclusion for very little. There had even been whispers--viscous rumors--that the god had abandoned Drathera entirely, turned abroad and vanished.

"That's why I need to do this." the berserker turned pleading eyes between the two of them, "Innogen, you know what the Arbiter's creed says- power without principle is wasted, but principle without strength is pointless. Every stroke of the Arbiter's sword felled legions of the beasts. By marching, countless lives were saved. But I have not the power to do the same by myself! I am no son of a Dragon God, to command the world. Only a Primal can give me that power."

It was a stupid motivation, but it was also honest. None of her (extremely valid!) points were answered by sheer determination to be a hero, but it would have been an insult to a warrior's spirit to simply ignore Karmordi's heartfelt plea.

No, under the Tenants, there was only one proper response to such thoughtless determination.

"I'm not going to help you kill yourself." the witch warned the young berserker, "And I wasn't kidding about the time. But I'll meet you halfway- if you want my help killing a Primal, you need to show me that you can stand up to that kind of power. Meet me tomorrow outside the city, on the shield road, and I'll give you a test. You pass, we'll work something out. You fail, you fail. Agreed?"

Hope lit Karmordi's eyes, and he almost nodded at once before a new question occurred to him: "Why on the Shield Road? Shouldn't we use the practice grounds?"

"I don't want to annoy the Librarians." said Imogen, as if that were a full and complete answer, "Yes, or no?"

"...yes." said the young Ork, gaze set. "I'm sorry, again, for interrupting your conversation."

[Finn]

Finn supposed that was valid. A moritasi had all his faith, and even He was inscrutable. The Greater Gods were even farther removed from human understanding. In his sense of the world, that was why the drægir and moritasi existed, as bridges between mortals and immortal and eternal forces in the world.

He smiled at Karmordi when his sparring partner told of his march under Raxen's banner.

"Of course you did," he affirmed quietly so as not to interrupt the conversation between Orkhan. He hadn't known the berserker long, but he assumed he would have probably accidentally harmed his brethren to get to the front of the line to volunteer should their God put out the call.

Otherwise, he quietly witnessed the conversation, learning more nuances about Orkhan and Dratheran culture as he did.

After they agreed, he slipped in, "I don't suppose I might be allowed to witness this test?"

Karmordi grinned, all tusks and teeth, "I shall give you something to write a song about, friend Finn."

The bard grinned back, though his teeth, even and white, were less impressive than the Ork's. But blue eyes swung to Innogen, as the decision was more likely hers to make.

"I will come up with a more creative title than The Berserker and the Great and Ancient Witch," he promised, his grin going wry. He had, apparently, made the connections between snippets of things he had heard in passing and the woman lounging before him. As a bard in government, he knew all too well how honest praise could become propaganda. He was sometimes uncomfortable with the glories thrown at his feet; he could imagine she might be as well, though he was curious to know the truth of her story, should she ever deign to share.