Sandry woke up with a headache rivaling some of her worst days of magical recovery, with a strange recounting of the time her siblings tried alcohol for the first time. She was sweating profusely and felt acutely uncomfortable lying across hot sand.
With a quick mental stop, and a check with her hands, she realized she was actually on hot sand. She sat up slowly, trying to focus her thoughts on where she was and what had happened to her.
"Mila, give me strength," she prayed aloud, looking at the vast desert around her. She lay in the middle of several sand dunes with no footsteps anywhere around her, nor landscapes to help provide any sense of direction.
She slowly stood. Her legs and arms wobbled with the effort, but she gently sank into her core, trying to find her siblings with her magic. She slowly fell into her center, seeing her magic as a fiery spindle. Her friends were here too, as was her Uncle, her old teachers, and students, with a thread to connect everyone. She attempted teasing a thread and questing down her magic to Daja, who felt the closest – all the other ties, especially those not to her siblings, felt weak and shaky.
With a sudden blast of strange power, Sandry was jolted out of her quest, falling further down the sand dune she stood in. Her mind reeling, she realized she could barely feel Daja at all now, only a small recognition that her sister was alive. With a gasp, she reached into a pouch hanging around her neck to find her thread circle, only to stop halfway through the action. She and her siblings had recently escaped a magical border in Namorn, her empress-cousin's territory, and destroyed the magical artifact in yet another magical feat. They hadn't understood the occasion themselves, which caused the thread to be destroyed and to leave a physical scar on each, but Sandry was terrified to not be able to contact her sister.
Taking a deep breath, she began to worry about her conditions in the present. She shook out her expensive silks, thanking the gods she was wearing light layers, and began to reshape her veils to prevent sunstroke and overheating. A quick shake of her skirts and petticoats took care of wrinkles and a brush across her breast brought cool relief and an explosion of sand, fleeing pockets where it did not belong.
Just feeling worried enough to try again, reaching for an even longer distance to contact Briar, a shout stopped her. Though she did not understand the language, she held her ground, keeping her strength in reserve; the guards of Carthak, having been sent by the emperor and the mages of the royal university to look for a disturbance in the magical realms, yelled "Hold, in the name of our august emperor!"
Briar woke to the loud cries of monkeys. With immediate watchfulness, he sprung to his feet, ignoring his aching bones and pounding headache. Grabbing a knife from his lower back and one from his boot, he slowly crept through draping vines and heavily leafed ferns of jungle land. He wobbled near some more poisonous looking flowers, exhilarated to see something new and feeling frighteningly afraid. Had some dream possessed him to return to the dangers of Yanjing or was he merely fantasizing of the newest exotic garden to create? The plants and climates made him fear he was trapped in another dangerous world, where imperial might would keep him chained and those he loved in torture. His night terrors from warfare had left Briar mentally scarred, though he was on the mend.
Hearing a scream, he decided to hold off judgment but investigate.
He slowly crept towards the noise, though he still felt off balanced and paranoid. He spread out his magic into the wildlife, feeling completely new sensations. The trees were hardy and able to live in multitudes of climates, though this jungle-like climate was clearly their best habitat. He felt the fruit bearing plants lavish in the attention of howler monkeys, whose travels spread to other areas of the plateau to spread their seed. The lower level ferns with their poison slowly crept toward this new creature, the boy who felt like kin.
The grasses, jungle vines, and the brightly blooming flowers gave their best warning, with unasked defense. The arrows that were shot toward the young man were deflected and absorbed by suddenly dropping vines; the flowers popped in front of approaching dark haired and wild eyes soldiers; and the grass told Briar of an enemy's approach.
However, the battle was short lived. Briar parried a sword stroke with his two daggers, briefly disengaging to throw another knife toward a quickly approaching enemy. He turned to the sword-bearing foe, keeping his defense up, but he wasn't prepared for his opponent to jump five feet in the air and kick him on the collarbone.
He fell back several feet, nearing unconsciousness from the sudden pain. Jungle creepers and grass flew his way, quickly trying to protect him from pain and detection. A soldier with long-haired raven feathers woven into his braids quickly approached with a sword upraised.
"No, Rifou," the sword wielding foe said. "The jungle has accepted this guest. He isn't one of our enemies. The general may like to hear word of this stranger."
Nawat Crow looked on with interest at this bronze colored stranger – a skin tint strange enough to mark him as a non-Islander to anyone, not only a crow related to the wagering god Kyprioth. His flock-mates quickly bound the man with hemp and rope, finding no less than seven knives on the man. Nawat couldn't wait to let his Aly, or the ferociously calm and unexcitable general Ulasim, know about his newest conquest, though he thought first to let the nearest member of the Chain examine the youth. The way the jungles had moved around the newcomer could be something more suspicious than the crow-man could determine. Besides, the governor of Tongkang needed to be handled carefully, hopefully with crow fletched feathers, and Nawat had already notched an arrow to his bow.
Daja felt pleasantly comfortable. She heard no chatter from the apprentices living below her suite – nor were the fires smoking and ready for a day of work in the forge. It must be Watersday, she thought, the day of worship.
However, even knowing these comforts, she felt that she was laying on moss, under a tree about to lose its shade to sunshine. It was coming on noon, and she was far away from her forge, home, and family.
Daja sat up slowly, assessing all her options. She was not the kind of person to panic, over-assess, or make any decision without the full picture before her.
She sat underneath a large pine, evergreen, with a large rock formation behind her. Ferns nearby suggested colder climates – the sky above suggested rain within hours, though her position was defendable from all kinds of weather. Her magical reserves, she checked swiftly, were at half strength. Her connection to siblings and friends was terrifyingly abysmal, almost as bad as her later studies with Frostpine, before her family had reforged their magic. Her Trader's staff, one of the constant companions of her life, was nowhere near her. Her magic detected several types of minerals and cave formations to her west, but worked metal was not within her range.
She attempted to stand, but her legs gave halfway through the attempt. "No matter," she thought, "more time to plan a course of action."
That Daja knew she needed to prepare her next move was something of her second nature. Every forging needs reheating. Whether she knew what was happening or not, she planned as well as she could. Going from a daughter to outcast, then to sister to stranger, then re-embraced as sister and newly found nisamohi, Daja protected her heart as much as she could and was used to planning for new trauma. She had found love with her Trader family brief, with her foster family magical and ever-lasting, and with a special Namornese lady… it was splendid and glorious, but all too quickly lost, and the experiences had taught her to be cautious.
Daja did not cry for the unexplained changes in her life. She pondered and she worried, but she steadily hiked through the evergreen forest towards the cliffs she sensed. There were several semi-precious jewels there, she could feel, but also stronger metals that may help her forge a weapon. Finding herself in unknown territory, she attempted stealth, but she still unaccountably felt nervous as squirrels, birds, and even deer watched her pass.
Finally cracking through the last of some rather untamed brush, she found a series of caverns with a small stream flowing through an inner cave. It was very cold to touch, with no magical residue she could detect, so Daja filled her stomach and pondered her next options.
The cave she found was uninhabited, as far as she could tell, though there were a short hunting knife and hatchet. There were old animal droppings of some kind, as well as traces of some type of opal dirt. More importantly to Daja, there was enough of a fire pit that could possibly heat enough to re-forge her newly found dagger or axe, as well as a stock-pile of fuel to start. Since Daja had not woken from this strange dream and with her magic still pulsing in her veins, she began to worry she was in actual danger.
She used the sharpest edges of axe and knife to sketch symbols into the other object. Feeling a strange foreboding that something was seriously wrong, she gently cut into her palm where bronze living metal stretched over her skin. Draping that over each object, and pressing the flexible metal in her symbols, she heated each object and pushed her magic into strength, durability, sharpness, and hope. None of these changes would last as long as they could, several years of durability, were she at full strength with her forge, magical oils, and the repetition of forging available; but knowing her own strength, she had a dagger to protect her and an axe to bring lumber and game for the time being.
She kept a sharp watch as well she could for the rest of the day. She felt more exhausted than she normally would, as she only had modified two objects with her power. On the other hand, she thought ruefully, I have no idea where I am – my day could just be starting.
This proved to be a practical thought as the next few hours continued; she maintained her fire to keep her warm that night, eating berries from a nearby blackberry bush. A dark furred wolf with patches of white fur watched as Daja's fire went down; even though he only saw in black and white, Daja confused him, as it seemed warmth and heat wrapped around her as the night went on. With a woof, Shortsnout decided to tell Brokefang of a new development in the eastern hills. Strangers who moved the air like this could pose a threat to the pack or to the valley they called home.
Tris.
When she dreamed, she sometimes relived the minutiae. The harsh things she had heard or seen, before she was accepted as a sister in a family that used magical ties stronger than magical laws thought to be universal. Sometimes it was from her childhood, where she heard family members and classmates talk about her behind her back. Sometimes it was as a practicing mage, stronger by far than many she met, but banished behind their jealousy and unforgiving judgment. Worse than all of these, she sometimes dreamed that the winds talked to her.
In the dreams, it was something that made sense.
The winds would swirl around her, bringing skirts and petticoats to dance above her sensible boots. She was almost always standing upon a stone-skirted tower wall with storm clouds racing in from the west. In her vision, her eyes filled with far, far-off scenes: of Ragat and the temple community just now recovered from a magical disaster caused by a past ruling council; of the further reaches of Namorn, a country she and her siblings had just escaped from; and of the sea. Endless. Ever-lasting.
She would race further west, following the wind, hoping for glimpses and snippets of sound. Her magic gave her nothing. She saw nothing and heard nothing.
But when she would return to her body, there would be voices. Nothing her power plucked away for her brain to hear. Yet she would hear it. The wind would slide over her nose, under her spectacles, and over her earlobes.
Trisana. It is coming for you.
She would always wake up trembling. This time, she would not wake in her own bed to the sound of Summersea's harbor waves; rather, the sound of glass scratching other glass, the war-cry of her beloved pet Chime, resonating through the air, would help her shake off her trembling and start a day far stranger than she could have imagined.
Sandry tried to remain calm, despite the fact that she was lightly bound to a swift horse in the middle of nowhere.
The group of dark-skinned soldiers that had found her spoke in a language she had never heard. When she attempted to interact with them, she saw that they recognized her language, but weren't fluent themselves. They had quickly bound her hands and feet in chains, despite her struggles, and placed her on this horse. She withheld from turning her powers against them – after all, she certainly wasn't going to survive in the middle of whatever desert she had woken up in. And whatever rest and food she could afford would help later, if they forced her hand.
Furthermore, Sandry could see that three of her companions were mages. They glittered with magic in her sight. She quickly looked through her own power, bringing a change of sight upon herself, to discover their talents. Their magic was odd to her; it was certainly a kind of academic magic, for it was contained within their bodies like other mages she had met – and they all carried items imbued for protection or strength of some kind, though she didn't recognize many of the symbols or charms.
Sandry reached inside herself again, for the hundredth time. She could feel her siblings: Daja was closest, to the north; Briar somewhere west; Tris was the furthest, stretching thin and taunt and, at times, feeling almost insubstantial. However, each time she quested down their ties, she was rocked back into her own body, as if a rubber band snapped. And each time, she reeled in her saddle. After the last attempt, she noticed two guards had moved to flank her more closely. The three mages had also repositioned closer to the young noble; and though Sandry knew mages couldn't feel the type of magic she shared with her siblings, she thought amusedly, "Well, it seems I'm not the only one being cautious." Despite her flippant thought, she was mentally reviewing her situation.
I appear to be in a foreign land. My magic has been sapped considerably, possibly to the effect that my siblings are out of reach. I have been captured by soldiers and mages who appear not to speak the same language. My wealth and position are with Uncle, who will assuredly look for us all when he discovers whatever has happened; however, in the meantime, I must use my wits to protect myself from assassins, kidnappers, and anyone else intent on harm. How I will manage that, I have no idea.
By the time night fell, several hours later, Sandry was rocking in her saddle, having barely had enough strength to wrap the chains around her wrist around the saddle hook. The strangers pushed her to the side, setting up a temporary camp. One of the mages, a woman, based on her veiled face for desert travel, sat next to the noble. She gave her water from a goatskin bag, helping her lift with the chains. She also unbound one of the longer portions of Sandry's veil from under her braided hair. She gently draped it across her mouth and nose, leaving corn-flower blue eyes visible, and secured the free edge on the other side.