Broken Lands

Chapter 425 – Water Birds

They were back in the World Tree about an hour after dawn the next morning. It was a short trip along the root where they found the next door: an enormous panel of mother of pearl surrounded by a border of twisted roots or maybe vines that were rooted in both the wall and the floor. Inlaid into the panel was another swirling pattern. This one looked like wind to Sophia, a thin hurricane or perhaps a tornado.

When Dav touched the panel, it vanished. All they had to do was step over the roots onto the yellow sand in front of them to enter the next region.

This time, they didn’t immediately find the beginning of a Challenge Chain that could lead them to the next area. The area they started in was nearly the opposite of the area on the first floor: a slot canyon with pale yellow and brown striped walls and a floor made of sand that was perhaps one shade darker than the yellow that was most of the walls. 

Every area was supposed to be accessible without the need to fly, but many Challenges were difficult to reach on foot. That didn’t matter for the Flying Stars; Ci’an was up in the sky moments after they realized they had the choice of right, left, or up. She sent back an image of the surrounding area that was mostly sand with a series of slits a lot like the canyon they started in, arranged like a fan with a bright area near the wide part of the fan. 

Worse, Ci’an saw dark clouds in the other direction. It didn’t look like it was raining yet, but it was going to.

It wasn’t hard to guess that the glint in the distance was water, but even that guess was enough to send them all flying up out of the deathtrap that surrounded them. No one wanted to be caught in a slot canyon when it started to rain.

That was probably the first Challenge they faced, even though they escaped it almost an hour before the rain actually started. The second challenge wasn’t formal; instead, it was figuring out where to go next. Unlike the first floor, this one wasn’t littered with obvious small changes in the landscape that indicated different Challenges. It was hard to say if they were simply skipping Challenges on the ground or if the entire area was about survival the way the slot canyon flood probably was.

They circled above the canyon for a while and watched to get an idea of what they might face in the future. The flood cleared twenty minutes after it began, far faster than it should have. Sophia flew lower to get a better look; she couldn’t see as far as Ci’an or even Dav could and she didn’t have the goggles Xin’ri had that let her see farther.

That would probably be a good thing to ask Xin’ri to make for her in the future. It didn’t come up often, but right now it was annoying and it seemed likely that goggles would be useful later on while making their way through challenges designed for avians.

Sophia turned to tell Xin’ri about it only to be interrupted by a mental shout from Ci’an. “Sophia! On your left!”

Sophia tucked her wing close to her body and spun to the right at the warning. She didn’t have to see whatever was coming to know she needed to avoid it. A whistling sound pulled her attention to a series of small projectiles as they whipped past her.

No, wait. Those weren’t projectiles; they were tiny birds. Tiny birds made of water. Lots of tiny birds made of water.

“It’s a clamor of stormlings?” Sophia clawed for the air to climb away from them as they turned to her again. The reason they were called a clamor was immediately clear; every single one of the stormlings whistled as it moved through the air and many of the whistles were quite loud. “They’re not really a Challenge; the World Tree calls them an environmental hazard. They’re formed when stormwater overwhelms an existing stream or creates one, like the floodwater below us, and they spread the storm by attacking anything in the sky.” 

Sophia paused for a moment. She was certain there was something the World Tree wasn’t telling her, which made something else clear. “We’re in a Challenge right now, a Challenge for the skies. I think we triggered it by flying above the flooded canyons.”

“Right. We need to destroy them, then?” Xin’ri pulled a staff out of nowhere, then dismissed it again. “Stormlings are probably safe against lightning; too much lightning in a storm. Hm. How about stone projectiles?”

“They’re made of water,” Sophia answered doubtfully. “I’m not sure they’re even monsters, so I don’t know what will hurt them or not. I can see mana coming off them; I guess that’s to be expected.”

Xin’ri swapped staves again. “Then I guess we’ll find something out. Whatever I do should have at least some effect on constructs with your True Death effect, so I think I’ll try fire. I’ll have to get a little closer than I like but I can hit a lot of them at once.”

Sophia kept retreating but the stormlings followed her. They weren’t quite as fast as she was, but neither was Xin’ri, and the stormlings regained the distance they’d lost as Sophia turned to stay closer to her fox-eared friend. “Go for it; I don’t think I can outrun them in a loop. If it doesn’t work, I think I can dispel the magic holding the claymore together.”

A couple of the stormlings were right behind her when sheets of flame from Xin’ri’s staff washed over the rest of them. The whistling roar ceased almost immediately; when Sophia checked, even the pair that weren’t caught seemed to have turned into undifferentiated water that was curving towards the ground. That made it clear they weren’t individuals; the flame must have destabilized the entire clamor.

Sophia watched the water as it fell. Something about it bothered her. The mana content was too high. “That destabilized their shape, but there’s still something there. Watch for it; I think the stormlings might return once they get more stormwater.”

It was only a guess, but Sophia thought it was a good one.

“They won’t have to wait long.” Dav sounded worried, and the image that accompanied his words said why. The stormclouds in the distance were rolling towards them at a speed that was clearly unnatural. They’d be in the storm in less than a minute; none of them could fly fast enough to outpace the clouds. “There’s no rain right now, but the clouds are getting darker and I just saw some lighting.”

The thunder arrived before Dav could even mention the lightning.

The stormlings’ water splashed as it landed on the side of a sand dune and rolled towards one of the canyons. Sophia watched it instead of the clouds, but nothing happened for a moment after it entered the canyon. That just made her more nervous; something was clearly going to happen. 

Her anxiety was justified when a fully-formed water heron sprang from the rough floodwater. The storm might not be here yet, but their next problem definitely was.

Sophia projected the watery sketch of a water bird to the rest of her team. “Any objections to me breaking the spellform that keeps it together? I can definitely do it here, but if we run into something similar on the last level, it might not work. It might be better to figure out how to kill it normally.”

They found out about that little trick of the Guide’s the hard way; creatures weren’t solely more powerful in the more difficult areas, the spells that maintained constructs were also made better. Sophia could still eliminate them by tearing their spellforms apart, but they were tough. That wouldn’t be a problem here, not in an area meant for people at the first upgrade, but they were going to have to deal with a fourth upgrade area before they could talk to Archon of Stone Issvako. Sophia could handle something tougher than the third upgrade constructs with difficulty but if it had any way to restore its spellform, she might not be able to.

“We can ask around,” Dav said dismissively. “We haven’t run into any of the Challenges that we heard about yet, but if we ask around, we can probably find out how other people deal with these birds.”

“Ci’an? Xin’ri? Do you need me to wait for a moment so you can test anything?” Sophia couldn’t think of anything else in her kit she wanted to test against the bird, but she didn’t want to stop the others if they had something.

“No, I’m done,” Xin’ri denied.

The heron froze in place for a moment and started to fall, then flapped wildly to gain height. 

“I’m done,” Ci’an reported sadly. “It’s more resistant than the stormlings, and I can only affect them temporarily too, enough to slow them down even in groups but not enough to stop them. There’s just not enough of a mind there to affect.”

Sophia muttered to herself about missing Ci’an’s contribution again. The Night Owl was simply too subtle; 

Sophia usually couldn’t see the effects of her Abilities and didn’t even realize she’d done something. It was even more annoying because Sophia knew she ought to be able to notice it. She just wasn’t aware enough of what was happening on the rest of the battlefield unless Ci’an called it out. She kept reminding herself to notice and then when the fight started, she completely forgot.

Her blindness didn’t change what she needed to do next. Sophia slid a little closer to the water heron until she was certain she had its attention, then she stopped, hovering in a way that a true bird couldn’t manage. 

The heron flapped mightily and rose nearly straight up in the air. Water swirled around it and seemed to gather mana as it came closer and closer.

Sophia decided not to see what the water was going to do once it was close enough. It was almost certainly some sort of attack, and she didn’t feel like dealing with it. They could find out about that at the same time they found out what else would kill it; she still wasn’t getting anything from the World Tree that would help her understand the water heron. 

Oh, she had its name, but “water heron” really didn’t tell her much. She also knew that it was another environmental effect even though it looked like a bird and that it was formed when a clamor of stormlings was broken. None of that was new; she saw it happen.

The moment the heron was fully within Sophia’s aura, she grabbed for the spellform that animated the bird. This wasn’t one of her Abilities; instead, it was something she’d learned as a child and practiced regularly while she was growing up. She had to know how spellforms broke if she wanted to make good ones, and this was a bad spellform. A little more mana in one place and a little less in another tore it apart like cheap tissue paper.

Plumes of mana spilled out of the spellform as the bird evaporated. Sophia scattered them across the sky, preventing them from coalescing again. This time, the magic was fading.

The storm faded, too. Within minutes, the sky was clear, with only a few puffy white clouds providing shade from the scorching sunlight.

“I think I broke the entire effect,” Sophia sent to her team. “I didn’t expect that. Uh. What now?”

“Upstream, I think,” Ci’an answered the question without commenting on what Sophia had just accomplished. “I don’t want to see if there’s another environmental Challenge now that that one is done. Let’s find something more normal.”

Maybe Ci’an didn’t ignore it after all.