Unbound

"We need to speak about this," Zara said, and placed a crystalline container atop the smooth, chitin table between them. Felix and she were seated in chairs within Zara's quarters, a place she'd immediately marched off to before he had even landed. He shifted in the chair, not looking at the glimmering crystal and its burning sigils, but the thing refused to move.

Bolted in. Right. Felix settled on folding his arms, instead. "I thought we were done with this?"

"As did I, at least for the moment. But then I found this, haunting among the crystal matrices." Zara waved her hand over the container, which looked remarkably similar to a huge tank shell, were it made from multi-hued crystal. A sound rolled outward from her gesture and a sudden haze appeared above the crystal, from which Zara plucked a single, quivering strand. It shimmered in brilliant but faded ebon-gold.

"Right. That." Felix took a breath. "There's something you should know..."

Felix outlined his vision of the strange, armored woman in the company of a Priest of the Pathless. Zara went pale, cursing in what sounded like several languages, none of which were familiar to Felix. He got the gist, though.

"You're sure it was a priest?" she asked him, finally.

"Positive. I saw a few of them back in Haarwatch. Those robes are pretty distinctive."

"An Unbound...they have an Unbound under their thumb." Zara leaned onto her elbows and placed her hands over her mouth, and for once, Felix felt her loosen the hold she had on her Spirit. It trembled. "We always knew this might happen. Feared it. If she is as powerful as you say, then we must move faster."

"Faster? You mean collecting the other Unbound to us?"

"Convening—like calling a meeting?" Felix raised an eyebrow. "How? Where?"

"My order makes it a point to not stay in any one place for too long. The superstitions against Sorcerers burn too bright. But we have ways of conversing over distance."

"You've said that before. How?" Felix asked.

"A special artifact, resonance, and a pool of liquid Mana mingled with our Marked blood." Zara held out a hand, and a familiar symbol appeared above it, etched in glowing blue-green lines. Mark of the Cantus Sodalus. "If you still held my Mark, you could do it too."

"Pass," Felix said, not breaking eye contact with Zara's pure blue gaze. "No one Marks me against my Will, Zara."

"That is—" Her gaze hardened, yet she looked down, back at the crystal container. "Of course."

A moment stretched between them, weighted down by the past. By mistakes. Felix breathed through his nose, forcing his heartbeat to slow, to calm. "I thought that connection had fled after I saw the vision...why's it still here?" Felix asked.

Zara gestured again, and the thread appeared. The ebon-gold coloration was almost transparent now, a faint wash against the shadows. "It barely is. I only found it because of a certain resonance with you. And Beef."

"Resonance how?"

"Your Aspects, at their base, all have a unique vibration. With enough practice you can begin to hear it, but understanding it is a task that would take many lifetimes, even for one of us."

That was interesting, but certainly not pertinent at the moment. Felix filed it away for later. "And how were you able to dredge it up? Every time I go near this one it—" Felix reached out and the ebon-gold cord squirmed away before vanishing completely. "See? Without my Skills, it runs from me."

"Curious," Zara murmured. She made that inaudible music once again, but the cord did not come back. "And it is truly gone now. Fled." She pondered a moment longer before apparently remembering something. "And why didn't you tell me of this sooner? We spoke soon after you found the Regalia on Beef. Why not then?"

"Isla."

It was all Felix said, but it was effective as a gag in Zara's mouth. She huffed a sharp breath though. "Isla is trusted, Felix. My superior trusts her, as to others of the order. Why can you not?"

"She rubs me the wrong way. She's pushy. Any number of things, but really it's just my gut," Felix said. "And I've learned to trust my gut whenever possible. At this point, however, I'm more concerned with what that priest may have done to the Unbound woman. Her voice was just...it was a dead, flat sound. No emotion or life to it."

"If she was as powerful as you say, then the Hierocracy would have trained her...and they are brutal. I can only imagine what must have been done to this poor woman, but I imagine she is powerful. If her Spirit affected the guards to a Mountain City like that, she is not a force to be trifled with by any except, perhaps, a Grandmaster. And if she is like you, then even that is not enough." She tapped twice on the table. "Tell me of the Dwarves. Their armor, the details on the gates. Anything."

Felix recounted everything he could, though putting it all into the right words was difficult. "And their armor had these geometric squiggles on them, across the chest."

"Was the armor dyed? Or cast of a particular color metal?"

"Uh, yes. A brassy color, but the center of their chest was a red with a white series of zig-zags on it," Felix recounted.

"The Redspine Clan, then. They control a number of cities in the Rimefang Mountains. Hard to determine which one this might be, not from what you saw, but the good news is they are far to the north of us."

"How far?" Felix asked. "Do we have to worry about them finding us?"

"About as far as it is possible to be without stepping into the Hoarfrost," Zara said. "It would take us an entire year to reach them, were we to fly upon a true Manaship."

The Hoarfrost. That's where the Frost Giants had come from. "That's...that's really far," Felix said finally.

"It is. The Continent is quite massive, and even the Hierocracy only skirts the edge of its grand breadth."

Felix had been told the Continent was huge, but this was a scale he couldn't fit his head around. How big was the planet?

"What I do not understand is why they are in the mountains." Zara said, either not noticing or ignoring the expression of consternation on Felix's face. "The Rimefangs are far away from Amaranth and only tentative allies with the Hierocracy. Trading partners only. To unleash such violence upon them would do more harm than good."

"They're hunting, clearly," Felix said. Zara raised her eyebrows. "What? It's obvious. If she's that volatile, why use her on allies? I'd be using her to do the same thing we're doing. Finding more Unbound."

"Ruin and Damnation," she cursed. "You're right." She slammed the table. "We need to perform the ritual again."

"Agreed. Do you have what you need?"

"I do."

Felix stood up. "Then let's get started."

Back in his Stronghold, Zara had performed a ritual to hone in on the connections Felix held to his Unbound brethren. It had allowed him to focus on Beef, finding him among the deserts of the Scorched Expanse. It had been a disorienting experience akin to his Memory delving, but Felix had plenty of practice at this point.

Sigils and glyphs were drawn around him, radiating in an array of concepts that Felix still only partially understood. Sigils for all three Aspects were there, along with the standard elements and more arcane markings. It was huge, and took Zara a solid hour to set up. By the end of it, Felix sat in the center with his legs folded, and concentrated. He dropped down into his core space, falling into his Bastion and landing atop the tower there within seconds.

The silver needle atop his tower shone bright, bundled with all the connections he had every established. They grew by the second as new, barely visible cords threaded through far brighter strings...and somewhere in their center were a number he'd found before. He thought of home, of Earth, and a bundle of cords were suddenly there, vibrating with a handful of familiar melodies. They burned him as he reached for them, and Felix gritted his teeth through the pain. First and thickest was the ebon-gold cord, but it fled him as it always did. Next came a cord of blackened-green and sandy-brown—Beef's—but he discarded that one.

C'mere you. The other six strands flashed with opalescent hues, each singing in a key once removed from the others. The first two were twined around each other, bright green-gold and purple-black in a complicated braid, while the next was a pale blue mingled with gold and sepia. The fourth cord was a murky, virulent green and bloody red, while the fifth was an iridescent white, like clouds across a blazing sunset. The last was hidden at the bottom, squirming almost as much as Imara's, and was a deep, dark brown, bordering on black.

He gripped them all, seizing them between his two hands and holding them tight. His Bastion lurched once, twice, three times before Felix was ripped into the distance and everything became a series of streaking lights. A gulf opened up beneath him, a distance of vast, incomprehensible enormity as barriers of light shattered against his Willpower and clutched Intent. Razor-edged shards sliced at him, at his hands, and Felix ground his teeth so hard he felt two break. He held on as the world became a hurricane of light.

He was swept into a jungle of thick foliage, hot and steamy against his skin, to find two small creatures running along thick, moss-covered branches. They were almost identical, save for coloration, and appeared to be some sort of reptilian dog. Hornedreptilian dogs, he realized. Mottled brown fur covered them both, but scales shimmered across their necks, faces, and limbs as they ran. One was golden-green and the other a purple-black, and as he watched the ground thundered with others.

Crudely armored men mounted atop massive boars came down the jungle path, trampling underbrush as they leveled short bows against the fleeing reptiles. "Kill them! First one gets half the loot!"

The bandits whooped in savage glee, firing a salvo of arrows that burst into flames, ice, and even lightning. Each and every shot, however, was met by a tangling whip of growing vines, catching or slapping the projectiles out of the air. Felix could trace the Mana use back not just to the green-gold lizard-dog, but also the purple-black one. Flowers of darkest purple bloomed along more vines that the boars ran across, ripping them apart to release clouds of noxious green pollen. The rearmost bandits clutched at their necks and faces, suddenly unable to breathe, before they and their violent looking boars collapsed onto the ground.

"Poison! Damn Kobolds're usin' poison!" one shouted. "Spread out! Don't breathe!"

Felix grinned. The Kobolds were still running, almost out of sight by that point, but Felix felt his vantage point shift to follow them. They were Unbound, just like him. He could literally feel it.

Yet as soon as he did, the world blurred once more, and Felix stumbled. When he righted himself, he was standing in...a library. Oh wow. This is nice.

All around him were books and shelves, some of which weren't even on the floor, but floating in the air like in a dream. The walls, what he could see of them, extended up so high Felix wasn't entirely sure there was a ceiling. Books and scrolls and tomes covered every conceivable surface, even the bottom of the dozens of balconies that dotted it all. And before him, seated atop a marble plinth with her legs crossed and eyes closed, was another Unbound.

She had the head of a deer—a doe, he supposed—and large, branching antlers. Robes the color of the sky and banded with silver and a muddy brown color across the sleeves and chest were draped across her broad, muscular form, and heavy forearms more commonly seen on warriors or smiths rested gently along the spine of a closed tome. More books floated around her, missing her antlers by the tiniest of margins as they floated on delicate traceries of blue Mana. Force, mingled with some metal and...sound Mana, apparently. Interesting. What are these books?

That was all he got, however, because once more the world blurred. His hand ached and burned, a phantom pain perhaps, or a memory of the cords that fought against his grip. Felix's step forward to grasp a book ended with him half-submerged in thick, god-awful smelling muck.

"Oh gross," he grunted, pulling himself free with some effort. The muck didn't cling to him, but it did resist his efforts to climb out of, somehow. It was distracting enough that he barely noticed the huge yellow eyes that watched him from only feet away. By the time Felix fully noticed them, the figure had emerged from the muck like a rising titan, filling the space of the strange, cramped tunnel he had found himself within. "Uh, hi there."

The figure didn't speak, only lunged with its huge, toothy maw open. A whirlwind of sensations accosted Felix, but there was no pain, just more blurring as the connection spun onward.

Okay. Not looking forward to meeting that one. Felix steadied himself, lights still streaming in a dizzying display around him. How'd he even see me? I'm not there.

The world resolved itself to a cliff top, where the world was apparently sheared in two. Below Felix the cliff fell for what looked like an eternity, until silver clouds swallowed the flat plane of split earth. Music sounded close by, high and bright like a concerto of woodwinds alone, and the rushing wind increased in speed. Over a hundred figures swooped low over the cliff, coming from somewhere above and behind Felix, to dive down into the silver clouds in a cascade of brilliant feathers. So many colors ranging from emerald green and deep purple to lemon yellow and royal blue, many of them attached to a single pair of wings in a wild show of plumage. It wasn't until the figures rose back up and out of the silver clouds that he realized that they weren't birds at all.

They were people.

Specifically, they looked like Elves on a serious diet. Slender and sharp-featured, it was no wonder why their wings lifted them so easily, thought Felix spotted trails of air Mana flowing around each and every one.

Which one is the Unbound, though? It was a massive flock of them, all flying in sync like it was a dance, their combined plumage forming colorful patterns in the sky that only heightened the trilling sounds of Harmony Felix could hear. Their spiraling flight was almost hypnotic, and he barely noticed that the world once again blurred into motion. Only the faint burning in his hands reminded him, and Felix jerked to a sudden stop at the edge of yet another precipice. This one, however, was within the dark earth, where only the faint, bio-luminescent light of weird mushrooms dotted the walls.

"Now where am I?" he asked.

There was a snuffling in the dirt and stone, and without another warning a creature emerged as if walking out of a pool of water. They were small, barely three feet tall, and with skin that looked like it had been burnt or was very, very dirty. Felix blinked. Or...their skin was dirt, as eyes as bright as jewels panned around the narrow cavern.

This must be the Gnome, Felix thought. Weirdest Gnome I've ever seen.

As he watched, the Gnome jolted before running and diving down, back into the solid stone. It parted for them like water, swallowing them completely just as a glowing ball of golden light approached the crevasse. An armored figure was there, strapped with enough weapons to furnish an army and trailed by a hand-wringing old priest.

"Imara," Felix muttered.

The woman stopped, and in a motion faster than Felix could perceive, unsheathed and thrust a long sword straight through his chest. His hands and chest burned, scorching him like never before as everything around him dissolved into streaks of glimmering light.

"—what was that?" the priest asked.

"Nothing. A ghost."

The voices turned to dust, and Felix was thrust away as the world shattered once again.

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