Flight
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[Stories of Aoth Sepret.]
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Patterns
The table was a map of a ruined kingdom, the vanquished plates and scattered crumbs whispered of a majestic breakfast that had once been. The group had conversed jovially long enough that Meadow and Rey were beginning a second or third round of nibbling, but no preserve or honey could make Aoth tolerate any more of the loaf of over-puffed northern bread. She excused herself and stepped out into the morning air where the fog suggested that noon remained a ways off.
The druid shrank into a squirrel's shape and scrambled down the rear of the Witch and Seer's steps. Already the back of her mind sparked with a squirrel's barked instincts, quick and nervous. The open ground was a land of danger and promise. The trees beckoned with arms of safety. It was a life of patterns. Descend, search, pause, search, pause, ascend. A reactive life and intensely territorial. She scaled a stout oak and leaped through the branches into the deep woods.
She heard her wife's voice from the night before: "She started walking around. That means her brain is sparking up." How true. And she still had puzzle pieces to assemble. Trying to ignore the ache of sitting still wouldn't yield better results.
For all his effort, George had been reactive. He'd sought patterns - specific signs as though they were spells in a wizard's library. Not even the Weave worked that way, not truly, and Signing was something else, something more fundamental than raw magic. But this, it seemed, was the impression George possessed when he went in search of understanding. He'd described envisioning starlight to navigate by. He'd built a hall of mirrors, she'd told him. Lighting his path with his own burning desire to do more, to be more.
Years ago Aoth had ceased calling him a paladin when it was clear that the comments only fed his sense of inadequacy. She may never have said so aloud, but she'd long seen him as a kind of apprentice---the best kind at that. Aoth had never desired an apprentice that thought like her, and disagreements with George were always a delight. Now she couldn't escape a certain sense of failure around his plane-touched state. It wasn't just the trees and grass, the water feared his burning. Water which knew no ending only cycles. The Helmite may have been right to fear him, but this was nothing like the Dawn Lord's promise nor the Fire Lord's dance of renewal.
The warning cry of a robin instinctively made Aoth flatten her body against an elm. A squirrel was not the appropriate shape for these thoughts. She shifted into the shape of an elf. Humanoids had such convoluted instincts, and it would be useful to develop her skill with this set. She continued to run and leap along the branches, now in search of echoes of the ancient woodlands, the memory of innocent possibility.
It was a younger, far less experienced version of the druid who had dedicated herself to protecting the Prime from planar incursions by advising its people against easy answers and solutions based on raw power. She'd since protected the realms from far worse than demons, but the decades had brought the repetitious suggestion that she and the others hadn't survived these battles unscathed. As much elemental as muscle and bone, she'd abandoned any claim to being human long ago. But she was of this world still, she knew that.
George, though...
George had looked inward, bathed in his own light, shed fiery echoes of his altered selves, and something must have cracked open. Something Other had slipped in though his starlit courses. They'd assumed it was the Fire of Devastation, Curiosity, or whatever name that extraplanar wanderer might answer to. Now Aoth wasn't sure whether that was preferable.... or if the Star might be one of many prophets who wished to claim this Other for their own use.
Whatever it was, nature quaked. They needed to find as many pieces of this puzzle as they could and quickly. These prophets and knights would offer answers, but each conflicting view might shed light on better questions. The shapeshifter had always preferred questions to answers. Answers could be so final, and there was only one answer waiting at the end of the last question.
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Flight
[Originally posted 16 Nov 2024]
The throne room, as far as Aoth is concerned, may as well be the cramped dining table where Gloom had cornered them. Dwarven windows. No one had laughed, but she was proud of that line. From across the room, she watches her wife explain some scene from military history while General Gom hemorrhages worry. Rey, as ever, is rhapsodical, doubtless, resplendent, and ordinarily Aoth would be fascinated by the display. But there have been so many maps since Norwick fell, so many lists, so many numbers.
Her mind wanders to the simple wooden docks. It had only taken her a few seconds to wrest control of the battlefield. She’d commanded the elements no matter where Hive’s puppet fled, she’d called on roots and the storm so that her allies could make it onto the deck. She was no soldier fit to march for days on end, but those seconds were a breath of fresh air. They’d fought so many immense beings over the past few years. Removed from ordinary soldiers, it was easy to forget that Moonreach was right about one thing. The Geese were worthy of their fear. That drowning soldier had seen it in the end.
She imagines none are terribly surprised when she walks out out of the throne room unannounced. Over the years so many have called her unpredictable in one way or another, but truly the reverse must be closer to the truth. They are all so thoroughly governed by unremarkable routines. Not the few she called friends, no, but people generally. Had it been this way before the air elementals merged with her soul? What if it was true that some Seprets were born of an inhuman storm? She remembers their last, short stay in the Plane of Elemental Air. Once her companions had chosen a direction to fall, that was it for them. In a world of infinite change, they chose gravity.
There was a light drizzle when she reached the roof, but she only had skin long enough to feel but a few drops before she was a whirlwind and airborne.
Lain Laurent had written that the enlightened lived in the past, present, and future at once. It had immediately seemed limiting to Aoth. Flight called from every direction. Perhaps she’d grown used to seeing the world from within the interlacing visions of Premonition. One future would never do. Time’s arrow was as optional as gravity. She'd written it all in her book, but they had fallen on ears as deaf as her plummeting companions.
The winds from the Icelace rebuff her, but she continues her upward course. The few meager clouds are already dispersing as she tears through them. She flies straight up until Peltarch is the size of a table then no larger than a dinner plate. She can see the fires of the Zhentarim. Someone in the council would have warned her about wyverns, but in this shape she can fly faster, higher. Then again, would these eyes work for what had called her?
She shifts into the shape of her birth and begins to swiftly plummet. Turning herself to face the approaching earth, she searches the landscape, scans the waterways, and scans the courses of the gathering armies.
“The wise must be agnostic toward time as anything but a temporary orientation.” She’d written that in her book too, but had she truly believed it? It had been something of a love letter in her own style, or at least a fascination. But words are shapeshifters, and she could believe it for the moment. She wouldn’t cast Premonition. She doesn’t need spells or a book or ink or a star from elsewhere. She controls battlefields as she controls the elements. And time? Time is another element. Time is motion and change. Time is as optional as gravity. Besides, she doesn’t want to Sign into being a world of her design. She didn’t believe in centers or permanence. She only wants to see unimpeded by gravity and routine.
Aoth falls—
No, Aoth flies downward. And she opens her eyes against the rush of air to see into the fractal twilight, the choices yet to be made, the surprises yet to be revealed…
