Sors- Kick his arse to the Moon and back? @_@ Dat a lotta kickin'
Goochflex- Garren be back soon. ^^ No worries there.
Angelus Zion- Are they green? They look blue on my TV. Oh well, I'll keep them blue, just for the sake of not confusing my little mind.
Sword Master Jeff- What was the incense? Not really sure, actually. I just liked the idea of it. ^^
Brutal2003- Time frame? It's closer to eight or nine hundred, actually. I skipped over some of the Moon Children earlier on, mainly because I didn't see the necessity for writing in every one.
That's all for now. I'm getting back to the happenings in Bale next chapter. PH34R. Or complain about the delay. Either works. ^-^
Side Story #4
The sun was at its zenith in the sky overhead; it's baking rays not quite able to penetrate the invisible barrier of magic that sheltered Ulara. Instead the town remained pleasantly cool, if not just a trifle chilly. Thin clouds of vapor were beginning to form near the height of the dome, but it would be a while yet before it would begin to rain.
Heaving a sigh, Nova shifted around on the bench until she was seated in the sunlight again. The weather was one of the few constants these days in Ulara. The timeless town had lost its sleepy quality, shedding it like an old cloak and instead donning a new one of watchful alertness. And yet there was very little that they could actually do to affect the outside world. In the sixteen years that had passed since the birth of Asalla's daughter, only Garren had returned to Ulara once, briefly, three years ago. Because he was staying to train in the island village of Rogue the news he had brought was piecemeal at best, but none of the implications of the situation where good. Ayrel's power was growing exponentially. The cult had rallied to her almost immediately after confirming her, but that was to be expected. They did worship her, after all. Surrounded by the cult and dually protected by Asalla and Mathis, the child was as inaccessible as the Moon itself.
A cool wind rustled the leaves of the tree branch overhead, and Nova drew her crocheted shawl closer around her. She supposed that she could have joined Garren and Dart in trying to track the child down, but it was therein that the problem lie. Even if Charle would eventually decide to change Ulara's taboos, she wondered if she would be strong enough to do it. In the years that she had known Asalla before she had given birth to the child, Nova had been one of the few that had ever been able to consider the distant woman a close friend. Garren had shared similar sentiments, she knew. As for Dart and Ragnarok, well, who ever really knew what they thought? Even so, the speed with which the three of them had come to accept Asalla as the enemy was unnerving.
**Nova sat on the edge of Garren's bed, watching as he hastily shoved his few belongings into a reinforced canvas sack. Admitably that was not much, but then again the bag was small and by necessity they'd have to be travelling light. His face was flushed, and his eyes were red rimmed and bloodshot as he tightened the straps that held the mouth of the bag shut. Nova wouldn't have put it past him to have been crying, but whatever had gone on earlier, his eyes were dry now.
"Garren? Are you sure you don't want to think this over?" she asked anxiously. Tucking her legs to her chest, she watched him overtop of her knees.
He lifted the bag, hefting it a few times to test the weight before setting it down again. Turning away from her, Garren pressed his hand to a small protruding pad in the wall. "I already told you, Nova. I'm not going to change my mind." His wings appeared briefly, shimmering in the dim light, then the magic in the air faded and the storage door popped open. Hurriedly, he began sorting through the racks of clothes inside.
"Why? Can't Dart and Ragnarok handle this on their own? They don't need you along all the time, you know."
Roughly he jerked off his rumpled and stained shirt and tossed it aside. Pulling out a vest made from thick black leather, banded with ribs of steel, he slipped it on and began to do up the laces holding it closed in front. "If I don't, he's going to have one hell of a job to do alone. Besides, we're going to be doing a lot of running to catch up. He'll need someone who can teleport." Still tightening the laces, he looked back over his shoulder and frowned at her.
Nova glared back at him. "Don't even think of saying it. Not even the Lady Charle can outdo Asalla when it comes to making jumps; so don't bother to ask me. I don't know why you're even bothering to try." Letting her legs dangle off the bed, she folded her arms and scowled.
"Because someone has to." Finished with the laces, he pulled a plain sleeveless shirt on overtop of it. Stepping back as the door slammed shut behind him, he crossed the room in three strides to the windowsill. And old wooden box sat there covered in dust; aside from a few fingerprints, it looked as though it hadn't been touched recently. Dusting it off, he fumbled with the catch on the latch. "If we don't hunt them down, who knows what will happen?"
"For the love of Soa Garren, listen to yourself!" Grabbing his wrist, she pulled it away from the box and met his eyes. "You're talking about hunting down your friend," she pleaded in a quieter tone, "is that what you really want to do?"
"No," he told her gently, easing his wrist from her grip "It'll never be something that I want to do. But at least with two of us, we may be able to get Ayrel and leave Asalla unharmed."
"And Mathis?" Nova regretted the words before they'd even left her mouth. Garren's eyes hardened and he looked away. Flicking open the box, he pulled out the glove and knuckles that were his weapon and jerked them roughly onto his right hand.
"That traitorous bastard can rot for all I care." He growled, and jammed the box shut again.
For a long moment no one said anything, each pointedly avoiding the other's eyes. Then the warp pad situated in the corner of the room flickered briefly, the system's equivalent of a polite knock on the door. Stiffly, Garren picked up his bag and slung it over his shoulder.
"Look, I've got to go."
"Garren-" Nova started, and then hesitated. What was there really that could be said? "-Just promise not to do anything you'll regret? Please?"
He stepped onto the pad, which hummed and started to glow in response to his weight. "I'll try." **
Nova blinked, surprised at the dampness around her eyes. Hastily swiping them with her sleeve, she got to her feet and shook the wrinkles out of her skirt. Getting sentimental now, of all times. That had been sixteen years ago and besides; it wasn't as though she loved him. At least, she didn't think that she did. Oh sure they were close; she'd even shared his bed with him on occasion, although she owed that more to alcohol than anything else. In the space of one thousand years, it was bound to happen occasionally. But love? She shook her head hard; already heading for the stone archway that led from the courtyard into the living quarters. This was pointless; hardly something that needed dwelling on. But of course, the moment she told herself to stop thinking about it, the thoughts just came flowing back.
The quarters were only marginally warmer than the air outside, but without the wind it felt more comfortable by degrees. Shrugging her shawl off of her shoulders Nova started for the warp pads situated neatly against the far wall, but she changed her mind at the last minute. There was nothing to do in her rooms that hadn't been done a hundred times already anyhow, and she was too restless for a nap.
The entry hall in which she stood would perhaps have better named a common room; furnished with sandstone benches strewn with blue tasseled cushions and small, polished tables cluttered with worn books, scraps of used parchment, and a dozen other odds and ends. The stone walls had been painted a pale blue some years ago, but now the paint was cracked and stained and in need of repair. Aside from herself there were only two men, Mikel and Juan, sitting at a bench off to one side of the pads and playing a game of Gambit with stiff paper cards. She nodded as she passed, but the players were too engrossed in the game to do much more than wave her off with a careless hand.
Choosing one of the arched passages leading down into the lower levels of the town, Nova tied her shawl around her waist as she walked. Most people were like that these days, now. Pointless activity occupied their waking hours, as they were desperate to keep their minds from what could be happening in the outside world. The residents of Ulara were used to waiting: it was something that they had become accustomed to. That didn't necessarily mean that they liked it.
The corridor took her down far below the quarters and past the libraries. Bulbous blue glowstones set into the walls didn't light the path so much as they defined the shadows. For all the decoration the bare walls showed one could have thought that the passage had been long out of use, but the worn floor beneath her feet was free of the dust that normally collects over time.
Coming around a bend, the hallway ended without warning and Nova found herself standing in the middle of a grove of oak trees, far below the lowest platforms of the city. Taking a deep breath, she let it out slowly as she looked around. The air here had more of a chill then in the courtyard she had just left, though under cover of the massively thick oak trees there was little movement in the air, if any at all. The clear, almost sharp scent of fresh running water was heavy on the air, covering even the rich scent of forest loam as she took a step out onto the thick bed of moss. The entire forest was carpeted in it; if anything grew it grew up from underneath it. The forest floor was a mass of uneven green swells where the moss had grown over rotting stumps and fallen logs. Here and there a stump poked through, but the rotting wood was more often than not covered by a tangle of brown vines that bore a host of tiny delicate yellow flowers. Angel's lace, she recalled. A pretty name. All around her the oaks rose up, more than seventy feet tall and thicker at the base than two winglies could get their arms around. High up through the canopy of gently waving leaves could be seen the occasional patch of cloudy grey sky, swelling threateningly as it prepared to rain. But there still was some time yet.
Nova's feet moved quickly now as they found the unmarked path. Her mother had shown it to her when she was little more than a babe; since then she'd frequented it more times than she could care to remember. The path in turn led to a brook, and this she followed upriver. The air was even cooler here, although it was the moisture in the air rather than the temperature itself that made it seem so.
The waterfalls that bordered much of the western edge of Ulara could be heard at least faintly from most of the outdoor regions of the city. The sound of falling water had been growing steadily louder ever since she had entered the forest; now as she turned one last bend the sound built up into a roar.
Nadliz was far from the largest of the falls; dropping from a rock precipice thirty yards above, it was a narrow ribbon of white water that cascaded down through the canopy of oak leaves to splash noisily into the brook below. The mossy banks ran steeply into the water and here and there fallen trees crisscrossed one another in the shallows, forming natural benches. Climbing up onto one of the trunks, Nova took an uncertain step, feeling the rotting bark slide beneath the smooth soles of her shoes. Years ago there had been proper benches here, but over the eons they had worn away until they were little more than oddly-shaped chunks of stone sticking out from a tangle of oak roots. No one had bothered to replace them because really no one bothered coming down here any more. Though as she settled precariously on a gnarled tree limb that hung dangerously out over the water, a slight rustle of fabric behind her alerted her that she wasn't alone.
Disappointed, Nova glanced back over her shoulder with a frown. Most people never bothered with this place; why did they have to choose now to start using it again? A reprimand on the tip of her tongue, it faded quickly when she caught sight of the other woman.
Asalla's sudden departure had affected everyone in different ways. As might be expected, her mother, Yellen, had taken it the hardest. For a moment Nova stared, absently steadying herself with one hand. Nothing that dwelt in Ulara could truly age, at least in a physical sense, but Yellen's shoulders were slumped with the weight of the years and her face was creased from grief. Her long silver-blue hair, which had once been the pride of her self, hung in limp tangles around her elbows, a reflection of the careless state in which she wandered about these days. She had become something of a sympathy figure, and while several of her friends had made a project of caring for her, most had given up hope. It wasn't just that the woman was careless: she didn't want to care anymore.
Nova dropped her gaze to the water swirling beneath her branch. A small trout was swimming in the shadow of the trunk, its side flashing slightly whenever light happened to touch it. Yellen made her feel uncomfortable. She still felt that the woman might blame her somehow; she had been Asalla's friend after all, and mothers tended to jump to conclusions about things like that. It was an irrational suspicion, but still. Picking a twig from the branch, she tossed it into the water and watched as it spun lazily in a circle.
Then the rain started to fall. It wasn't much at first, but the drizzle changed quickly to a steady downpour that fell in sheets as the breeze picked up again. Thin tendrils of mist crept out over the dimpled surface of the brook, swirling slowly as the winds stirred them before settling again.
Jerked out of her thoughts by the chill of cold rainwater tricking down her spine, Nova got unsteadily to her feet and pulled her shawl from where she had bundled it around her waist. Balancing precariously on the slippery trunk, she pulled the thing over her head and shoulders for all the good that it would do. Casting a quick glance back over her shoulder at Yellen, she hesitated before unfurling her wings and drifting back to the bank. Well, if the woman wanted to stay out here in the downpour, that was her own choice. Brushing a strand of sopping hair out of her eyes, she started for the forest.
"He died here, you know."
Just short of the first trunk, Nova stopped short and turned around. Yellen hadn't moved from where she sat on the toppled trunk of a birch, but her voice carried over the whisper of the falling rain. Feeling a wave of anxiety rise and fall in her stomach, Nova answered.
"Pardon?"
"The Ancestor." The woman's voice was low and mournful, but there was a curious lilting quality to it. "When his Forest died, his soul couldn't survive without it. A short while after he came to Ulara, he just faded away."
"Why?" Nova asked carefully, moving along the bank so that she didn't have to strain so much to catch her words.
"When you have nothing left to live for, why not?" She sighed, or at least her shoulders sagged. "It must be nice."
"Lady Charle wouldn't like to hear you talking like that."
"The Lady knows that I don't have the courage to do anything," she said morosely, "So she knows that she doesn't have to worry. Besides, if Asa.she were to come back, what would she do then, with her mother gone?" She turned to look at Nova at last, her rose eyes sad. "Sometimes I wish that I'd had the courage to go after her."
Nova shifted her weight uncomfortably, the wet fabric of her skirts clinging to her legs. "Why didn't you?"
"I was afraid," she said bitterly. "Afraid of the world, and afraid of what that Dragon would do if I tried to follow." She looked away. "It's not a nice feeling."
'I know,' Nova wanted to say, 'I'm afraid too. Of what might happen if Asalla comes between Ragnarok and Ayrel. Of what I might have to do if I were there.' But she kept those thoughts to herself. Instead she switched the topic. "What about now? It's not too late, I mean."
She regretted the words almost immediately, but Yellen didn't snap back like she had expected her to.
The woman sighed again, and dipped her foot into the brook. Her feet, Nova noticed, were bare. "Even if I could find her, I would just be in the way. If there was someway -anyway- that I even thought could do something I would but-" here her voice broke, and she drew her knees up to her chest. "I just want my daughter back!"
~ ~ ~
Sometime later Nova lie on her bed, staring unseeing out the window. The sharp staccato of rain on the glass fell on deaf ears as she drifted about on the edge of sleep, lost in thought.
"Sometimes I wish that I'd had the courage to go after her."
'She's not the only one,' Nova thought sourly to herself. The solution to things was simple in theory, but theory was just that. Actually finding the courage, the will, to make them work was another thing entirely. And then there were the emotions that tied people together. She knew very well why she could never face Asalla: even if the woman was willing to harm her, she could never bring herself to hurt a friend. It might be stupid, but that was just the way she felt. But if it ever came down to it.
"There's a difference between respecting your fears, and letting them rule your life."
Ragnarok had told her that once. The problem, Dart had told her later on, was knowing which was which. She almost laughed aloud, but halfway up her throat it became a groan and she rolled over onto her stomach. She finally understood the full implication of that statement, but it wasn't really a comforting thought. She could leave and help, and risk having to watch her friend die, or stay here in Ulara, waiting.
And leave Garren to make the choice alone.
She sat up and swung her legs over the side of her bed. What would he do? Certainly, he wouldn't want to harm do to her, but if he thought that there was no other way? She knew him too well to say that he'd back down. But something like that would stay with him: an open wound in his conscience that would never heal or fade.
Nova buried her head in her hands. There had to be an easier way. 'When you want everything, you get nothing,' her mother had always told her. But she didn't want either of her friends to have to suffer because of this. 'How is anyone supposed to choose?'
'You don't have to.'
The realization hit her like a thunderbolt. What if she went along, not to fight Asalla, but to prevent having to? She could never hope to match the younger woman in terms of sheer power, but she knew enough to be able to dampen another wingly's magic, even if it was only for a short while. If she could hold her off, cutting her off from her power without actually harming her, then Dart and Garren would have no need to deal with her. There were no guarantees, but it was still better than nothing.
Getting off of the bed, she headed to her dresser and began rummaging through the drawers, her mind working quickly now. There was no hope of knowing where Dart was at any given moment but if she were lucky Garren would still be in Rogue, training with the martial arts school there. And while she wasn't sure of the island's precise location, she knew someone who did.
Pulling out a sturdy canvas pack out from underneath her bed, she started to shove clothing into it. Caron kept a close watch on the portals these days, but there were easier ways in and out of the city, or so she had been told. Tygris hated flying in the rain, and unlike Garren she had never really caught on to the rudiments of the draconic language, but she felt fairly certain that she could convince the bird-dragon to see her way.
Pulling the drawstring tight, she slung the bag over her shoulder and took one final look around her room. It looked the same as it always had: smooth, slightly curved walls, only interrupted by the oval window set into the eastern wall and the near-invisible lines of the closet. The cradle-like bed was mussed and unmade, and a few books had fallen from the dresser and onto the rug in her haste to pack. After almost a thousand years, it remained essentially unchanged. Safe.
She looked around slowly for a few moments longer, then winked out of sight in a flash of green light.
Outside the rain continued to rattle at the window frames. Beyond that, past the skin of magic that isolated Ulara from the rest of time, the sun continued to beat down on the red-gold sand and shimmering mirages of the wasteland.
There. For all of everyone complaining that Garren and Nova hadn't been poking around lately. They'll be back into the mainstream of the plot soon enough. Once they actually manage to find Dart again.
Garren: **cracks knuckles** That shouldn't take too long.
Shade: -.-;Garren, I know you. You couldn't find your way out of a wet paper bag.
Garren: .you don't have to rub it in, you know. ;_;