Side A – Nia
Nia was in Trouble, and unfortunately that was literally true.
In playing her song to find Naosha, Nia had opened a pathway between herself and the Darkwood, and Elshira, her mother’s captor was adept enough as a sorceress to make use of such a foolishly provided opening.
Which was why Nia was in the process of drowning at the top of a mountain.
“What is the Sleeping Gods Hells is that?” she heard a voice, maybe Jurdy’s, call out.
It was not good that Nia could hear Jurdy’s voice.
The drowning wasn’t great either, but hearing Jurdy as clearly as she could meant Nia was being pulled out of the song.
That was bad because she was losing the searching connection to the Darkwood she’d forged through the song. If it fell apart, her efforts to find her mother would be far more difficult the next time she tried.
Bad she could deal with though.
Bad was like drowning on a dry mountaintop. Something you wanted to avoid, certainly, but a problem which could be addressed.
What worried her more than drowning or losing her connection to the song was that the sorceress on the other end of it, the one who was bent on hiding Naosha M’Kellin might be talented enough to make the mystical pathway her own.
Elshira was bad enough within the Darkwood. Giving her access to the Stoneling Mountains and the rest of the world beyond seemed cataclysmically unwise.
“We’ve got to get her out there! That things going to dissolve her!” It was probably Horgi who said that. The voice had the right timbre.
It was a reasonable concern too.
Reasonable but incorrect.
Nia kept her eyes closed and focused on her playing. There were rather a lot of things she needed to deal with and they were all demanding her attention at once, as problems often did. The trick, she knew, was to deal with them in priority order so that when she inevitably didn’t get to several of them, they would be the least important ones.
“Where. Is. My. MOTHER!” she demanded through the music.
The resistance she’d been struggling against cracked under the strain of her song.
Elshira was a sorceress of hitherto unseen power and cunning.
Which was both scary and impressive.
Nia was a Sleeping Gods Damned Shatter Drummer though and someone trying to take her mother from her raised a torrent of rage to drive into her song the likes of which she hadn’t even been able to summon when fighting for her life against literal gods.
The Blob Trouble that had journeyed across her song and enveloped her in a puddle of goo? The danger her fellow Shatter Drummers were in from the other Troubles which were racing towards her? The dead sorceress who was poised to metastasize across the world? None of those were as important as making sure her mother was safe.
With hands that began to burn with a brilliant flame of their own, Nia struck her Shatter Drum and ripped apart the veil which Elshira had cast before her.
Side B – Yasgrid
Abandoning people was harder than it seemed. Yasgrid was convinced that she needed to find a safe space to tuck Lem, Ilia and the Gardener away despite their wealth of knowledge and (in the Gardener’s case) vast amount of power.
In theory they could have made amazing allies, filling in the gaps in her knowledge of the Darkwood and wielding a power beyond even the most potent ones Elshira could bring to bear.
In practice though, Yasgrid suspected that their knowledge was shared by Elshira who would be planning for Yasgrid to act upon things which, if Yasgrid was the Elven woman she appeared to be, she would well versed in.
Ignorance is almost never a protection or a tool, unless it belongs to someone else, and Yasgrid knew that was as true in this case as in any other, but she also knew the price her new companions could pay for standing with her.
And so she had to be rid of them.
“Oh, there you are,” Ilia said, from around the corner of an outcropping Yasgrid had been hoping she could sneak past. “Lem says the stew is ready, and the camp fire has plenty of logs for the night.”
Which was a shame.
Normally the Darkwood didn’t have a surplus of fallen wood and without an axe Yasgrid could have been forgiven for wandering far enough away to get lost.
It wasn’t her brightest or most subtle stratagem but simply slinking off had started to look like her only option after more clever approaches to leaving her companions behind had failed.
Pass through a small town and point out that the people lacked protection from Elshira’s forces or the Fate Dancers? The Gardener had grown a ring of shrieking flowers around the town. If they were burned the smoke emitted would act as a powerful sleep inducer he explained, and had instructed the townsfolk in the meanings of the flowers various calls.
Stumble on an ancient but highly defensible ruin which Yasgrid had spied several days past? Ilia had pointed out that it was only ruined from the point of view of an Elf. Dozens of species of animals had created a comfortable home within the ancient fort, and any new arrivals were likely to throw off the delicate equilibrium of their habitat.
In truth, Yasgrid could have tried harder to make either of those options work but in both cases the locations had been missing one crucial element.
Neither town nor ruin could provide the safety her companions needed.
No place in the Darkwood could.
Which meant there was only one real destination she could march towards.
“If you’d like the mild version of the stew, you can just take what’s in the bowl. There’s a spice mixture in the pouch over there though which is quite refreshing,” the Gardener said.
“Thank you,” Yasgrid said, taking a pinch of spices from the pouch and her bearings.
The walk to the edge of the Darkwood wouldn’t be a long one, but something told her getting the others to cross its borders was going to be the true journey that she faced.