That Which Broke
Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2025 12:28 am
Frost 73, 124
It was a beautiful day, and Imogen Ward was a giant snake.
She’d spent the better part of a week now as a snake, and the end of that period was rapidly approaching- the Lieutenant had let her know that the blood vessel’s capacity was almost full last time he’d appeared, and she hoped that would suffice to repay her debt in full. The witch was used to spending time as an animal; she’d spent weeks traveling upon the wings of an albatross, and days in lemur form. But she’d only spent short stints in hydra form, and so she really hadn’t been sure what to expect of the great monster.
The snake body which Imogen was inhabiting was, in her estimation, quite pretty. The totem’s scales had been dull white, almost like a cream, but she had altered their hue to match her own opalescent patches, and the overall effect was literally dazzling. The sunlight shining down on Dawn peak during the day made her shimmer and glimmer, while the diffuse sunlight coming from the huge Dawnstone deposits underneath her ponderous body created a handsome iridescent effect. It was almost a shame that nobody had stumbled upon her sunning-spot, but she thought it poor manners to give the pilgrims of Ysadrin’s road heart attacks.
Before coming to Ailos, she’d worried about what kind of instincts she might have to contend with; would her body demand that she hunt? Would she feel aggressive, territorial? Would she get bored, lying there in the sunlight for days? She’d brought a set of books with her to read, but quickly concluded that the hydra’s huge eyes were very poorly suited to the task. Cards were right out.
Thankfully, it turned out that the main thing hydras liked to do was sleep.
So it was that Imogen had spent most of the last few days asleep, waking only briefly to blink in the dazzling sunlight and shift her big coils. From time to time, she would pull water out of the nearby springs and coat her scales with it, in a vain attempt to keep her skin from drying out, for hydra were fundamentally built to dwell in lakes and rivers, not perched atop thin mountaintop streams. But mostly, she slept, feeling the sunlight drain into her body, slowly replenishing the blood lost to each exsanguination.
For the most part, she slept without the interruption of dreams. As a precaution, she kept a Pact weapon manifest, and wore her greatshield upon the hydra’s head like a jaunty little cap. Even if she were taken unawares in her sleep, it would defend her- and more than that, the dreamstone worked into the shield served as a charm to guard her from the nightmares which had plagued her since the disaster in the Warrens, all those years past. She’d refined the charm on the shield over the years, and the totem now served as effective protection against all of the demons of Thiovan’s realm.
Well, most of them, anyway.
When she opened her eyes, Imogen Ward found herself lying on the worn and broken altar inside the Shrine of Ysandre, the small marble chapel which stood just outside the final trail towards Dawn Peak’s apex. Her shield floated, upright, behind the altar, faintly glowing with an aetheric sheen alien to all of her witchcraft. It took her but a moment to realize that something had hijacked her dream-calming charm to serve as a channel into her mind.
The Sunsinger forced herself to a seated position upon the stone table, blinking in the sunlight pouring through the shrine’s high windows, and peered into the room. Was there any sign of…?
There. Seated upon one of the crumbling stone benches of the shrine was a tapir. A shiny tapir, clad in some indeterminate and platonic metal rather than chitin, in the ordinary way of those creatures.
Imogen pushed herself off the altar and stalked closer to it, looking cautiously around. Illusion this place might be, but the spirits she worked for had an obnoxious habit of hiding important details in the corners of these visions.
Once the witch closed in on the tapir, she squatted, bringing her face level with its beady little eyes. “I take it you want something else?”
Her voice was less friendly than she liked–it was unprofessional to chide a client–but the emotion was genuine, and well-merited. “In case you haven’t noticed, the last job nearly killed me. Well, the one before it also nearly killed me, but this one really brought me to the brink. I mean, I’ve no qualms with the payments, but those won’t do me any good if I’m in Wraeden’s realm, will they?”
The little metal spirit did not speak, nor did she expect it to. Instead, it licked at her face, its long metal tongue flickering out to tickle her nose, then turned away to look at the aisle between the stone benches. Imogen’s eyes followed it, landing on…
A huge copper beetle was clinging to the wall on the other side of the shrine. It was no kind of animal she’d ever seen before- except, with a sinking feeling, she realized she’d been that before, if at a larger size. It was the very image of the great chimera she’d devised to carry the Hytori Abmetal to its hidden grotto.
The witch would have stared at the beetle for a while, but the sound of heavy footsteps distracted her. She rose to her feet and turned, only to flinch in horror as the face of Birchen filled her vision. The dead elf stood next to the shrine’s doorway, naked as the day she was born (and reborn, horribly, again and again), except that what was on display was not flesh, but steel.
“What manner of fiendishness-”
The witch’s angry demand faded as a shadow passed over the sunlight in the door, the light darkening precipitously. A great, taloned hand grasped one side of the empty doorframe, then the other, as the Silent Fisher bent low to fit itself into the shrine. Imogen’s indignation faded to blank incomprehension as she stared at the hollow white eyes of the monster for a moment.
Or, rather, the spirit taking on the monster’s form.
The four spirits inside the illusion of Ysandre’s shrine turned away from Imogen as one, all looking back towards the doorway. Again, shadows darkened the high windows, as though some great bird was passing beneath the sun. The entire shrine shook, ancient dust falling from a hundred broken surfaces and coalescing in little clouds as something enormous landed on the pilgrim’s road outside.
Imogen didn’t bother to ask the spirits what was going on- she knew very well what she’d see outside. It was pointless to argue with metal spirits when they wanted to tell you something. She only wished they were better at actually doing it.
The witch walked carefully out of the shrine, ducking underneath the razor-sharp limbs of the spirit wearing Kegumu Rekaka’s form, and walked out onto Dawn Peak, where an enormous iron dragon was waiting for her.
It was Deravaecia, of course–or rather, a doppelganger–and the iron dragon’s gaze was fixed on the little orkhan woman. The spirit’s eyes were unblinking; Imogen found it difficult to keep her own open at all under the harsh sun. Nevertheless, she gathered what she could of her indignation and annoyance, drawing herself up and raising her chin to look back at the big spirit.
“Well? What’s all this about, then?” the Great Witch demanded, “I remember everything we’ve done; I didn’t need any reminder.”
The spirits did not answer her, which was a continual annoyance. They hardly shut up around Norani, but she got fucking pantomime and puppet shows whenever they wanted her to practically lose her life in some insane request, which they would never explain.
“Fine, then you listen!” Imogen pointed at the spirit disguising itself as a dragon, “I’m not an idiot, you know? I understand what you want. You want to stabilize the flow of metal aether beneath Ecith.”
She wasn’t exactly exercising a detective’s insight for this one. It was basically what Kynne had told them, before she got so drunk she had to lie abed for two nights straight. She’d tried to explain this to Norani and Destyn, back on the beach. The southern continent’s ley lines were all fucked up, and it tracked that the elementals would very much want to do something about it.
But the thing was, she couldn’t figure out how any of this was helping. The first few jobs, sure, she’d corrected aetheric imbalances and the spirits of metal had grown in strength. But why had they sent her to collect the Silent Fisher’s feather? Why had they asked her to wake up Deravaecia? What did any of that have to do with what Vhexur wanted?
“This is why I told him to just write out a contract, you know? No vision quests! No riddles!” Imogen stalked closer to the spirit dragon, until she was practically poking it in the snout. “So how about it, huh? How about you just explain what you want, this time?”
Deravaecia’s doppelganger looked down at the witch with great, solemn eyes… then turned, nearly sweeping Imogen off her feet. The dragon opened its mouth and let loose a blast of fire so intense that it was practically plasma, sending multiple rounds of shockwaves through the air as it boiled the water out of the atmosphere in seconds.
The little Orkhan woman found herself on her butt, shielding her eyes from the blinding white stream of fire. Thankfully, it was pointed away from her, and she was very used to heat, but she still found herself hyperventilating a little at the shock of it.
The beam of light burrowed into the rocky slope of Dawn Peak, carving through clay and dragonshards and rock faster than even the great pneumatic drills of Zaichaer’s stacks. The spirit dragon kept it up for a long time, long after the real Deravaecia would have been forced to stop and catch her breath. Seconds bled into minutes as Imogen sat there, helpless, shielding herself from the violence of the spirit’s response.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the spirit dragon closed its maw, smothering the beam of light. It turned back to gaze at Imogen, its eyes as unreadable as they had been at the start. A great smoldering hole was burned into the mountain behind it, blackened rock and carbonized clay tunneled out in a perfectly straight line, proceeding deeper into the earth than her eyes could see.
The Ork sat there a few more moments, then clambered to her feet. The dragon watched her, passively, still as a statue. Even in the realm of dreams, where details of the earth and sky shifted chaotically, the metallic outline of the spirit never changed.
“You want me to go in there, I suppose?”
There was no answer from the spirits. They knew that she understood; they saw no need to speak on the matter any further.
“Right. Fine. No contracts. Got it.”
The Great and Ancient Witch trudged dejectedly into the fire-blasted bowels of the earth, in the depths of a dream, wondering if there was ever going to be an end to these insane quests.
There was no way to know how long Imogen walked in the depths before the dragonfire tunnel ran out and the cavern began. It was child’s play for her to summon the light to see by, but in Thiovan’s realm the contours of seconds and minutes and hours melted together like taffy. She might have been walking for minutes, or maybe days.
Either way, in time she found herself walking in a new space- one constructed of marble, after the fashion of the great temples of the God-Kings of old. She mistook it for a cavern, at first, due to the sheer scale of the place. It beggared any of the great caverns she’d seen in the Warrens of Karnor, or even the grand house of the Voniad Koid.
The air in this place tasted fallow, like dust which had spent long ages unobserved. When she raised up her light to see if she could illuminate the distant ceiling of the chamber, she saw nothing but darkness in every direction.
“Where the hell is this?” Imogen asked herself. She regretted it at once; her voice distorted and echoed against the marble, and her words felt like a trespass. Unease crawled up her spine like a spider, and she suppressed a shudder.
But she forgot all about it a moment later, as the mote of light floating above her open palm suddenly illuminated something new. It was shiny and bright, entirely untouched by dust or rust or any other blemish, and it took Imogen only a few seconds to realize that the object was made of metal. Iron, it appeared, new and well cared-for.
As she approached and her mote of light illuminated more and more, it seemed at first that she was approaching a wall of iron. The metal rested upon the marble floor, then curved upwards, out beyond the reach of Imogen’s light and out of her sight.
Some sort of statue? The witch wondered, but it seemed too big for that. Perhaps something like one of the Imperium’s metal spiders, a construct? Had they sent something even more terrible to Ailos, all those years ago? Was that what this was all about?
The witch slowly circled the vast metal object, trying to illumine something more recognizable. Again, she couldn’t have said how long she walked- but it certainly seemed like an alarmingly long time. How big was this thing? There couldn’t have been this much iron in all the weapons of Raxen’s armies combined, could there?
Then, without warning, she came upon the monster’s head.
It was, of course, a dragon. Except that it was way, way too big to be a fucking dragon. Its head was as big as Deravaecia. If it actually stood up, if it spread the legs and wings which she couldn’t even see…
The thought was terrifying. It would dwarf even most of the Primals.
But even as her head swum with the sheer enormity of it, her analytical mind began to break through. This looked very much like a dragon, like an iron dragon large enough to crush an army without even noticing it- but it couldn’t be. She felt nothing at all from it. The dragoncraft of such an enormous beast ought to dwarf Deravaecia’s own aura… but it did not. She felt nothing at all.
Imogen crept closer, observing the thing carefully for any sign of movement- but there was none. It did not open its eyes. It did not even breathe. It seemed to her that it must be dead.
Well, if it was dead, she could nevertheless learn from it. The witch summoned her sword, bringing it up to point in front of her. If she simply pricked the beast’s skin, she ought to be able to see some shadow of its-
CLANG!
Imogen’s sword bounced off the air several feet in front of the vast dragon as though it were steel. The witch blinked, entirely unsure of what had just happened. She brought the sword around again, and it glanced uselessly off the air again.
“What the hell is this, now?” Imogen’s voice came out in a whisper, even though she hadn’t intended it to. Some remnant of animal instinct, no doubt. Was this creature alive? Dead? Was she supposed to free it? Free it from what?
“Hello?” Imogen said into the darkness, raising her voice. It seemed to have no effect at all upon the vast dragon, frozen solid in the air. “Hello? Anyone? What exactly am I meant to-”
Suddenly, she wasn’t alone in the great chamber. The metal spirits surrounded her in a circle, all in the totem forms they had taken earlier. The Ork froze, unsure of what was going on now. Then, without warning, the spirit which had taken Birchen’s form stepped forward. The dead woman’s mouth opened:
Seek the pardon of your lord
For that which broke must be restored
By earth and sky
By star and sea
Is every prisoner set free.
The great serpent sleeping on the mountain twitched from time to time, her nightmares finding scant purchase upon her form. She shifted her great bulk, coils entwining, as she wound deeper down the roads of nightmare.
Then, without warning, she awoke, her head jerking upwards, eyes snapping open. It took her a few moments to understand that she was no longer in the dream realm, no longer deep beneath the mountain, but lying atop it. She shifted, looking from side to side, taking in the details of the waking world to confirm her presence in Ransera once more.
“Oh! Imogen!”
The hydra’s head jerked again as a familiar voice reached its ears. Lt. Tilman was rounding the bend, waving.
“Good news, our job here is done! We can head back north, now!”
It was a beautiful day, and Imogen Ward was a giant snake.
She’d spent the better part of a week now as a snake, and the end of that period was rapidly approaching- the Lieutenant had let her know that the blood vessel’s capacity was almost full last time he’d appeared, and she hoped that would suffice to repay her debt in full. The witch was used to spending time as an animal; she’d spent weeks traveling upon the wings of an albatross, and days in lemur form. But she’d only spent short stints in hydra form, and so she really hadn’t been sure what to expect of the great monster.
The snake body which Imogen was inhabiting was, in her estimation, quite pretty. The totem’s scales had been dull white, almost like a cream, but she had altered their hue to match her own opalescent patches, and the overall effect was literally dazzling. The sunlight shining down on Dawn peak during the day made her shimmer and glimmer, while the diffuse sunlight coming from the huge Dawnstone deposits underneath her ponderous body created a handsome iridescent effect. It was almost a shame that nobody had stumbled upon her sunning-spot, but she thought it poor manners to give the pilgrims of Ysadrin’s road heart attacks.
Before coming to Ailos, she’d worried about what kind of instincts she might have to contend with; would her body demand that she hunt? Would she feel aggressive, territorial? Would she get bored, lying there in the sunlight for days? She’d brought a set of books with her to read, but quickly concluded that the hydra’s huge eyes were very poorly suited to the task. Cards were right out.
Thankfully, it turned out that the main thing hydras liked to do was sleep.
So it was that Imogen had spent most of the last few days asleep, waking only briefly to blink in the dazzling sunlight and shift her big coils. From time to time, she would pull water out of the nearby springs and coat her scales with it, in a vain attempt to keep her skin from drying out, for hydra were fundamentally built to dwell in lakes and rivers, not perched atop thin mountaintop streams. But mostly, she slept, feeling the sunlight drain into her body, slowly replenishing the blood lost to each exsanguination.
For the most part, she slept without the interruption of dreams. As a precaution, she kept a Pact weapon manifest, and wore her greatshield upon the hydra’s head like a jaunty little cap. Even if she were taken unawares in her sleep, it would defend her- and more than that, the dreamstone worked into the shield served as a charm to guard her from the nightmares which had plagued her since the disaster in the Warrens, all those years past. She’d refined the charm on the shield over the years, and the totem now served as effective protection against all of the demons of Thiovan’s realm.
Well, most of them, anyway.
~~~
When she opened her eyes, Imogen Ward found herself lying on the worn and broken altar inside the Shrine of Ysandre, the small marble chapel which stood just outside the final trail towards Dawn Peak’s apex. Her shield floated, upright, behind the altar, faintly glowing with an aetheric sheen alien to all of her witchcraft. It took her but a moment to realize that something had hijacked her dream-calming charm to serve as a channel into her mind.
The Sunsinger forced herself to a seated position upon the stone table, blinking in the sunlight pouring through the shrine’s high windows, and peered into the room. Was there any sign of…?
There. Seated upon one of the crumbling stone benches of the shrine was a tapir. A shiny tapir, clad in some indeterminate and platonic metal rather than chitin, in the ordinary way of those creatures.
Imogen pushed herself off the altar and stalked closer to it, looking cautiously around. Illusion this place might be, but the spirits she worked for had an obnoxious habit of hiding important details in the corners of these visions.
Once the witch closed in on the tapir, she squatted, bringing her face level with its beady little eyes. “I take it you want something else?”
Her voice was less friendly than she liked–it was unprofessional to chide a client–but the emotion was genuine, and well-merited. “In case you haven’t noticed, the last job nearly killed me. Well, the one before it also nearly killed me, but this one really brought me to the brink. I mean, I’ve no qualms with the payments, but those won’t do me any good if I’m in Wraeden’s realm, will they?”
The little metal spirit did not speak, nor did she expect it to. Instead, it licked at her face, its long metal tongue flickering out to tickle her nose, then turned away to look at the aisle between the stone benches. Imogen’s eyes followed it, landing on…
A huge copper beetle was clinging to the wall on the other side of the shrine. It was no kind of animal she’d ever seen before- except, with a sinking feeling, she realized she’d been that before, if at a larger size. It was the very image of the great chimera she’d devised to carry the Hytori Abmetal to its hidden grotto.
The witch would have stared at the beetle for a while, but the sound of heavy footsteps distracted her. She rose to her feet and turned, only to flinch in horror as the face of Birchen filled her vision. The dead elf stood next to the shrine’s doorway, naked as the day she was born (and reborn, horribly, again and again), except that what was on display was not flesh, but steel.
“What manner of fiendishness-”
The witch’s angry demand faded as a shadow passed over the sunlight in the door, the light darkening precipitously. A great, taloned hand grasped one side of the empty doorframe, then the other, as the Silent Fisher bent low to fit itself into the shrine. Imogen’s indignation faded to blank incomprehension as she stared at the hollow white eyes of the monster for a moment.
Or, rather, the spirit taking on the monster’s form.
The four spirits inside the illusion of Ysandre’s shrine turned away from Imogen as one, all looking back towards the doorway. Again, shadows darkened the high windows, as though some great bird was passing beneath the sun. The entire shrine shook, ancient dust falling from a hundred broken surfaces and coalescing in little clouds as something enormous landed on the pilgrim’s road outside.
Imogen didn’t bother to ask the spirits what was going on- she knew very well what she’d see outside. It was pointless to argue with metal spirits when they wanted to tell you something. She only wished they were better at actually doing it.
The witch walked carefully out of the shrine, ducking underneath the razor-sharp limbs of the spirit wearing Kegumu Rekaka’s form, and walked out onto Dawn Peak, where an enormous iron dragon was waiting for her.
It was Deravaecia, of course–or rather, a doppelganger–and the iron dragon’s gaze was fixed on the little orkhan woman. The spirit’s eyes were unblinking; Imogen found it difficult to keep her own open at all under the harsh sun. Nevertheless, she gathered what she could of her indignation and annoyance, drawing herself up and raising her chin to look back at the big spirit.
“Well? What’s all this about, then?” the Great Witch demanded, “I remember everything we’ve done; I didn’t need any reminder.”
The spirits did not answer her, which was a continual annoyance. They hardly shut up around Norani, but she got fucking pantomime and puppet shows whenever they wanted her to practically lose her life in some insane request, which they would never explain.
“Fine, then you listen!” Imogen pointed at the spirit disguising itself as a dragon, “I’m not an idiot, you know? I understand what you want. You want to stabilize the flow of metal aether beneath Ecith.”
She wasn’t exactly exercising a detective’s insight for this one. It was basically what Kynne had told them, before she got so drunk she had to lie abed for two nights straight. She’d tried to explain this to Norani and Destyn, back on the beach. The southern continent’s ley lines were all fucked up, and it tracked that the elementals would very much want to do something about it.
But the thing was, she couldn’t figure out how any of this was helping. The first few jobs, sure, she’d corrected aetheric imbalances and the spirits of metal had grown in strength. But why had they sent her to collect the Silent Fisher’s feather? Why had they asked her to wake up Deravaecia? What did any of that have to do with what Vhexur wanted?
“This is why I told him to just write out a contract, you know? No vision quests! No riddles!” Imogen stalked closer to the spirit dragon, until she was practically poking it in the snout. “So how about it, huh? How about you just explain what you want, this time?”
Deravaecia’s doppelganger looked down at the witch with great, solemn eyes… then turned, nearly sweeping Imogen off her feet. The dragon opened its mouth and let loose a blast of fire so intense that it was practically plasma, sending multiple rounds of shockwaves through the air as it boiled the water out of the atmosphere in seconds.
The little Orkhan woman found herself on her butt, shielding her eyes from the blinding white stream of fire. Thankfully, it was pointed away from her, and she was very used to heat, but she still found herself hyperventilating a little at the shock of it.
The beam of light burrowed into the rocky slope of Dawn Peak, carving through clay and dragonshards and rock faster than even the great pneumatic drills of Zaichaer’s stacks. The spirit dragon kept it up for a long time, long after the real Deravaecia would have been forced to stop and catch her breath. Seconds bled into minutes as Imogen sat there, helpless, shielding herself from the violence of the spirit’s response.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the spirit dragon closed its maw, smothering the beam of light. It turned back to gaze at Imogen, its eyes as unreadable as they had been at the start. A great smoldering hole was burned into the mountain behind it, blackened rock and carbonized clay tunneled out in a perfectly straight line, proceeding deeper into the earth than her eyes could see.
The Ork sat there a few more moments, then clambered to her feet. The dragon watched her, passively, still as a statue. Even in the realm of dreams, where details of the earth and sky shifted chaotically, the metallic outline of the spirit never changed.
“You want me to go in there, I suppose?”
There was no answer from the spirits. They knew that she understood; they saw no need to speak on the matter any further.
“Right. Fine. No contracts. Got it.”
The Great and Ancient Witch trudged dejectedly into the fire-blasted bowels of the earth, in the depths of a dream, wondering if there was ever going to be an end to these insane quests.
~~~
There was no way to know how long Imogen walked in the depths before the dragonfire tunnel ran out and the cavern began. It was child’s play for her to summon the light to see by, but in Thiovan’s realm the contours of seconds and minutes and hours melted together like taffy. She might have been walking for minutes, or maybe days.
Either way, in time she found herself walking in a new space- one constructed of marble, after the fashion of the great temples of the God-Kings of old. She mistook it for a cavern, at first, due to the sheer scale of the place. It beggared any of the great caverns she’d seen in the Warrens of Karnor, or even the grand house of the Voniad Koid.
The air in this place tasted fallow, like dust which had spent long ages unobserved. When she raised up her light to see if she could illuminate the distant ceiling of the chamber, she saw nothing but darkness in every direction.
“Where the hell is this?” Imogen asked herself. She regretted it at once; her voice distorted and echoed against the marble, and her words felt like a trespass. Unease crawled up her spine like a spider, and she suppressed a shudder.
But she forgot all about it a moment later, as the mote of light floating above her open palm suddenly illuminated something new. It was shiny and bright, entirely untouched by dust or rust or any other blemish, and it took Imogen only a few seconds to realize that the object was made of metal. Iron, it appeared, new and well cared-for.
As she approached and her mote of light illuminated more and more, it seemed at first that she was approaching a wall of iron. The metal rested upon the marble floor, then curved upwards, out beyond the reach of Imogen’s light and out of her sight.
Some sort of statue? The witch wondered, but it seemed too big for that. Perhaps something like one of the Imperium’s metal spiders, a construct? Had they sent something even more terrible to Ailos, all those years ago? Was that what this was all about?
The witch slowly circled the vast metal object, trying to illumine something more recognizable. Again, she couldn’t have said how long she walked- but it certainly seemed like an alarmingly long time. How big was this thing? There couldn’t have been this much iron in all the weapons of Raxen’s armies combined, could there?
Then, without warning, she came upon the monster’s head.
It was, of course, a dragon. Except that it was way, way too big to be a fucking dragon. Its head was as big as Deravaecia. If it actually stood up, if it spread the legs and wings which she couldn’t even see…
The thought was terrifying. It would dwarf even most of the Primals.
But even as her head swum with the sheer enormity of it, her analytical mind began to break through. This looked very much like a dragon, like an iron dragon large enough to crush an army without even noticing it- but it couldn’t be. She felt nothing at all from it. The dragoncraft of such an enormous beast ought to dwarf Deravaecia’s own aura… but it did not. She felt nothing at all.
Imogen crept closer, observing the thing carefully for any sign of movement- but there was none. It did not open its eyes. It did not even breathe. It seemed to her that it must be dead.
Well, if it was dead, she could nevertheless learn from it. The witch summoned her sword, bringing it up to point in front of her. If she simply pricked the beast’s skin, she ought to be able to see some shadow of its-
CLANG!
Imogen’s sword bounced off the air several feet in front of the vast dragon as though it were steel. The witch blinked, entirely unsure of what had just happened. She brought the sword around again, and it glanced uselessly off the air again.
“What the hell is this, now?” Imogen’s voice came out in a whisper, even though she hadn’t intended it to. Some remnant of animal instinct, no doubt. Was this creature alive? Dead? Was she supposed to free it? Free it from what?
“Hello?” Imogen said into the darkness, raising her voice. It seemed to have no effect at all upon the vast dragon, frozen solid in the air. “Hello? Anyone? What exactly am I meant to-”
Suddenly, she wasn’t alone in the great chamber. The metal spirits surrounded her in a circle, all in the totem forms they had taken earlier. The Ork froze, unsure of what was going on now. Then, without warning, the spirit which had taken Birchen’s form stepped forward. The dead woman’s mouth opened:
Seek the pardon of your lord
For that which broke must be restored
By earth and sky
By star and sea
Is every prisoner set free.
~~~
The great serpent sleeping on the mountain twitched from time to time, her nightmares finding scant purchase upon her form. She shifted her great bulk, coils entwining, as she wound deeper down the roads of nightmare.
Then, without warning, she awoke, her head jerking upwards, eyes snapping open. It took her a few moments to understand that she was no longer in the dream realm, no longer deep beneath the mountain, but lying atop it. She shifted, looking from side to side, taking in the details of the waking world to confirm her presence in Ransera once more.
“Oh! Imogen!”
The hydra’s head jerked again as a familiar voice reached its ears. Lt. Tilman was rounding the bend, waving.
“Good news, our job here is done! We can head back north, now!”