Anything ~ 13!

- Andre -

Andre watched as arcane lightning coiled through the air above Taylor like a living thing as they ran. Since fighting the storm, they had already run for several hours, and there was no chance of them stopping the remainder of the day. He sighed at the tedium of bounding along while carrying Zed, and was lightly tempted to get the Bard to play his fast-travel music.

Then he remembered that Luke would likely break Zed’s neck if the Bard tried that again.

“Probably a ‘no’ on that idea.” Andre’s mutter elicited a curious glance from the Bard, but he didn’t break his meditative breathing to ask questions. The nose-flower he had generated for the Bard was keeping him alive, but there was no reason to test its effectiveness. Andre winced as he thought of that plant - there was a good chance there would be side effects. Hopefully everything could be taken care of rapidly… but the Druid knew that he would have preferred to test his creations on an enemy, not an ally; certainly not on a friend.

The hours passed swiftly, and relatively soon they were at the next landmark. The purple  twilight that passed for night here had well and truly set in, but that meant nothing to the powerful group except that Zed’s slumped form needed to be carried more carefully so as to let him sleep. Andre felt Taylor’s sharp gaze pass over him, and he felt a pleasant shiver run though his spine.

He knew that she was simply keeping an eye out for more ambushes, but… he had been attracted to her even before they had gone off to their individual training, and the small flame he had kept lit for her had never burned out. Speaking of flames, there had been many explosions of power, cacophonies of energy reaching into the sky the entire day. Clearly, the people searching for them were closing in; but running into trouble. He hoped that a few of them would fall into a spidery Terror-spell nest like the one Taylor had once regaled them with.

“From here, only a few hours of travel at this pace.” Taylor called softly as she pointed out Paper-crush Rock, which looked exactly like a wad of paper a furious artist might have mangled and tossed in the midden. “I had originally thought Inkwell Lake would take a whole day, but I guess I’m used to judging things by the ‘standard’.”

“Which we are clearly not.” Andre winked as he stated this fact, getting a snort from Luke and an eye-roll from Taylor. His next words were slightly sobering, “How likely is it that our destination is known? Will we have to push through a blockade?”

“I’m sure it’s guessed, based on our direction, but I doubt anyone knew we would go to the desert right away.” Taylor shook her head as she said this, trying to control her facial muscles so that her next words didn’t come out as an insult. “Going to the desert has always been thought of as the end of anyone’s career, even for Ascenders. For us to go there at the peak of our fame? Radically outside the norm. No one would expect us to be punished after our huge success.”

“Good.” Andre didn’t waste his breath after that, picking up speed in the direction the Namer indicated. The ‘night’ passed swiftly, and soon the banks of an ink-black river appeared on the horizon. A few hours later, they arrived at the banks of the river and began searching for a waypoint that would give them a good indication of where they should exit this world. “How huge is this lake?”

Luke looked into the distance, then shrugged. “Ocean of ink. Who cares?”

“It’s really hard to tell for sure.” Taylor glared at Luke’s flippant answer. “The ink here comes from the falls, and there’s a huge river from them that terminates at this lake. It grows and shifts constantly, and the ink is magical. That means it can recede a hundred miles overnight, or stretch until it is a thin but massive puddle. No one knows why; it’s just the lake. There!”

Taylor’s nonchalant explanation ended in an excited exclamation as she pointed out an obelisk marked with a character that meant ‘expanding sand’, the magical rune equivalent of ‘desert’. Andre checked on Zed’s condition as they hurried toward the structure, his eyes shrinking as he found dozens of roots that had grown into the Bard’s veins by following the lung’s pathways. As Taylor began opening a triangular portal to escape the World of Names, the Druid ever-so-carefully began forcing the roots to pull back and out of the Bard.

What he wasn’t expecting was the mighty resistance he got from the new plant. If Andre hadn’t been carefully controlling the plant, it would have thrashed and torn open every vein it had grown into; bleeding its host to death in mere minutes. Not trusting the plant for another instant, Andre fully removed it from the Bard, who began to gasp in both pain from the increased mana density… as well in horror from the plant as it was fully revealed.

The root structure had expanded to coat the entire interior of his lungs, so when Andre pulled it out, he pulled… and pulled… and kept going far after the whole thing should have been long gone. Andre extended his power into the plant, and felt slight resentment directed at him. He frowned and poured his will into it. Now that it was out of the Bard, it was safe for Andre to rapidly age it and collect the resulting seeds. He put them into his pouch, and burned every bit of the remnants remaining just to be doubly safe.

Only then did he step through the opening to the base world with the others, his tardiness earning him a few concerned glances. He merely shrugged and gestured at where the closed portal had stood a moment ago, “Just learned that I’m going to need to add a few failsafes to my creations going forward. I’m thinking rapid-kill, perhaps make them all sterile just to be safe-”

“Please… water,” Zed managed to gasp out. “I’m so dry.”

The group looked at him in concern, and hurried to pour waterskin after waterskin of liquid into him. Andre inspected the Bard to make sure he wasn’t about to burst into flame from a delayed reaction to too much mana. When he was sure that wasn’t the issue, he bowed to the Bard, “I think this is my fault. Please forgive the hasty actions I took in an attempt to preserve your life. I am… fairly certain that the plant I gave you to absorb the excess mana was directly pulling water from your blood to nurture itself.”

“I’m alive, I’ve got water, all is forgiven.” Zed magnanimously waved his drink as if he were an Emperor releasing a prisoner of war. “Even got a pretty good story out of it, if I can tell it and get people to believe that I’m not yanking their chain. Andre nodded at the Bard thankfully and looked around, noting that the area they were in looked nothing like a desert.

“Taylor, did we somehow come to the wrong location?” Andre blushed as the words left his lips, that had sounded really accusatory. “Just because, you know, look at this place. It’s all farmland!”

Taylor didn’t take offence, explaining the situation directly instead. “We’re only able to get close to the desert. The entire place is a mana dead-zone. Whatever happened here centuries ago, it’s still happening. The desert is growing slowly, and wherever it touches, the ambient mana begins filtering away. It makes opening portals directly into it really difficult, so we come here first. Once upon a time, the Scarrocco Plains were known as the most fertile land within three kingdoms, and was the breadbasket of the kingdom. Now… at least the land around the edges is still pretty fertile.”

“How strange.” Andre reached out to the life around him and began connecting to it. Soon he had gained enough ground that he was comfortable pricking his finger and letting blood flow from the wound and into a massive magic circle that he held spinning in the air. With a grunt of exertion, the ring turned horizontal and expanded massively, slowly settling over a mile of the land, with himself as the epicenter. Mana slowly seeped out of his body, but the relative slowness began to increase as more and more of the plant life in the circle was bound to him and began adding their fragments of mana to his own.

In under half an hour, he had connected with all the flora and brought it under control, gaining a powerful insight into the area right away. With a new base of power supporting him, his pale cheeks flushed with life and good cheer. “All set… we can get going.”

“We should really make a plan.” Taylor stated as they began walking. “If we’re gonna deal with assassins and the like, we should.

“Mind what you say…” Luke glared at the surrounding corn stalks as they bowed at the Druid in recognition, “There are ears everywhere.”

“I want to be mad that you made me look around.” Andre sighed after a long moment, “But I was the one encouraging you to get into a good mental place by making jokes, so I can’t even say anything.”

“I can!” Zed spoke up in disgust, “that was terrible! I thought we were actually in danger, then I realized that we were! From your dreadful wordplay!”

“Too corny. I understand.” Luke deadpanned, getting a full laugh from Andre for his trouble.

“Ah… I do love plant jokes something fierce.” The Druid wiped at his eyes and took a few deep breaths to release the shaky feeling in his core. The last few days of sudden political intrigue and fleeing for his life were… unexpected. Something about Luke of all people going out of his way to relieve tension really showed him exactly how wound up he really was. Andre felt a tight knot in his stomach unwind as he let go of the guilt he had been feeling over nearly letting his plant drink Zed’s blood dry. He had saved the Bard, and he would let it go at that.

The Druid took a while to order his thoughts, managing to bond to the flora they passed by almost unconsciously. His Circle Magic had reached tier six, level seven: basic plant life from the base world had no chance of resisting his will at all. They managed to find a path after walking through the ‘rough’ terrain, and decided to keep to the grass alongside the pockmarked and muddy roadway. Andre’s ability to control grass was easily on par with his mentor Xan’s, so the grass resisted their footfalls and allowed them to walk comfortably.

A fringe benefit was that all signs of their passing were completely hidden by moving in this way, so they didn’t need to fear that pursuers would be able to track them easily. Andre listened as Taylor started recounting all the possible border towns they could make into a base of operations, including the benefits and detriments of each. Natural resources, defensive positions, local attitudes toward outsiders… he shook his head as the words seemed to pour out of her endlessly. Not a syllable of the information was drivel; but the thought of all this information that seemed so useless being stuffed in her head - and used to its best effect to help The Four - astounded him.

Each of them spoke on what they thought would be the best place, and eventually reached a consensus. They adjusted their course accordingly, and walked at Zed’s pace for a few hours more. Eventually, they came upon a new road and began following it toward their destination. Andre stiffened as his ever-expanding ring of bound plants suddenly started screeching into his mind. He sniffed the air, and confirmed his worries. “Something up ahead is on fire.”

“A wildfire? Do we need to run?” Zed turned directly around and started back the way they had come, not waiting for an answer to his question.

“No… but it’s too big to be a camp. There’s a lot of plants ahead that are wilting away, and all of them are near the road.” Andre saw the question in Taylor’s eyes, and gestured in the direction they were moving. “About a mile that way.”

They picked up the pace, the Druid literally picking up Zed, and they blazed along the packed-dirt road toward what they now recognized as a column of smoke. Soon enough, a huge covered wagon appeared on the road, nearly fully burnt out. Taylor looked into the distance, trying to find the attackers. Seeing nothing, she gestured the team forward. “Go see what happened.”

Andre started forward, but since he was carrying Zed, Luke was far faster to react and inspect the scene. A moment after he got to the front of the wagon, he called out, “Ah-ha!”

“What is it? What did you find?” Taylor started walking toward the Murderhobo.

“I figured out why this wagon crashed.” Luke popped into view, lifting two bodies that had been burnt all the way down to their bones. “This wagon was being driven by skeletons!”

The other three stared at Luke as he stood there proudly holding the corpses. Andre shook his head, dropped Zed, and started opening a portal. “That’s it. I’m out. I’ll be back in a week. I’m gonna go find the limits of my Ability.”

Without further ado, he stepped through and into his hidden grove.