Serpentine Squiggles

Book 1: Cometfall 

Flashes of Lightning in Endless Rainfall 

Tressa Intro 

It’s Tressa, an old jewel cutter, who arrives, her frame tall and muscled and draped in silken robes utterly untouched by the rain. Thin gray hair falls to frame a darkskined faced, darkened further by scars and the twisting unnatural colors of lusterscarring. She’s the strange woman with a metal hand Aurora spent her childhood avoiding. Without a word, she has picked up a shovel to help Aurora dig her father’s grave.

The rain falls and falls as they dig, but from her robes Tressa retrieves a gem. Lifting it in her hand, squeezed between her fingers, it shines, flaring bright with each pulse of her heart. Tressa chants softly, and now light gushes out from the finely cut facets before soaring up. The light splits, reflecting through the droplets of rain, and then water is suspended in midair. A enchanted umbrella, willed into being.

Aurora’s impressed by the display. How did she do that? It should be impossible. Her father told her that enchantment requires tools. But this woman didn’t use any tools. Unless it’s the gem? But gems aren’t tools‍ ‍—‍ they have nothing to do with blocking water.

Tressa refuses to explain, and Aurora keeps wondering. Sunny and Blank do‍ ‍—‍ did‍ ‍—‍ things differently from her father. Sunny could just fire beams of light to cut or reattach tree limbs. But they were spirits, not humans, so of course their enchantments work differently. Wait, was this woman a spirit? Aurora asks.

In turn, Tressa asks a what spirit is. Aurora, not understanding rhetorical questions, wonders if Tressa is stupid. The woman gives a basic explanation‍ ‍—‍ a spirit is an embodiment of a bit of land.

But why is their enchantment different? Because they aren’t human? Aurora’s doesn’t know.

Plants grow from sunlight. They are sunlight, in part. So when that light shines out, they are shining out. Enchantment is about connections between two things. Humans can connect to what we touch, to whatever hears our voice. Spirits connect with whatever sees their light.

Aurora looks at the luster‍-​scarring on her face, and asks if that’s how she got those scars.

Tressa grunts with a smile. ‘To answer your question,’ she says, ‘a well‍-​cut gem traps light. So if I attune to the gem which traps light, I become the gem; I become the light within. And thus I can shine as a spirit does.’

More digging, then Aurora finally asks. ‘Why are you here?’

A glance up at the moon. ‘I thought something might go wrong tonight.’ Then, a glance down to the dead man. ‘I was right.’

‘If you knew’‍ ‍—‍ Aurora’s grip on her shovel tightens, then she throws it down entirely‍ ‍—‍ ‘why didn’t you stop it? Why didn’t you save him?’

‘Why didn’t you?’ she asks.

Aurora growls, and doesn’t have a counter‍-​argument. She doesn’t have to follow the rules anymore, does she? So she throw a fist. Tressa catches it in her offhand. Another punch, deflected without dropping the shovel. Tressa continue digging while Aurora kicks, grabs, lunges, and she’s not even able to interrupt the Tressa’s work.

Aurora was a strong kid; stronger than her dad, who did backbreaking farmwork, and she was scrappy enough even the village children older than her couldn’t beat her. Maybe Aurora had no hope of defeating this woman who was clearly a powerful enchanter‍ ‍—‍ but Aurora couldn’t even provoke her to enchant.

Tressa sighs, and then in a moment Aurora has been knocked to ground, pinned beneath the old woman’s foot. Aurora writhes and struggles, but then, faster than she can blink, Tressa has taken out a gleaming crystal sword and the point is at Aurora’s neck.

‘You know, by the laws of this land I could kill you for attacking me. Why shouldn’t I?’

Why shouldn’t she? Aurora had failed. Everyone she was supposed to care about was dead, and if she could have saved them she didn’t, and if she couldn’t, what good was she? What kind of hero let their family die? But what hurt more was seeing that Aurora was utterly helpless in face of a real enchanter.

So the girl breaks down, cries, wallows in weakness.

Tressa sags, and kneels to pick her up, carrying her back to the cabin and tucking her into the bed.

When Aurora sleeps, she has the same dream almost every night, but it’s so much more vivid now. She dreams of a gray wasteland of desolation. From the dust beneath her feet to the horizon is a land of crags and round valleys. Vacant and lifeless, devoid of plants, animals, even water. She can only gaze upward and watch as the stars turn.

Closed eyes see hidden light.

The next morning, along the dirt roads that lead to the town, Tressa walks with a dour Aurora; the jeweler is proposing to teach her enchanting and explaining the principles of magic, but Aurora counters that she never had any skill for farmsong, her father’s art, so Tressa explains that there are other arts, and gembinding in particular may be her aptitude, given her affinity for ice, a kind of crystal. (She saw the way the ice danced along the girl’s flesh when she tried to fight back.)

Tressa begins by explaining that Enchanting isn’t physical or exhaustible. There is no mana, just inexhaustible will. Enchanting is will manifesting an intent. To exert great power requires a powerful will and a focused intent.

Aurora counters that everything is finite. You run out of food, run out of time, people even run out of words to say. Surely you’d run out of enchanting too.

Conservation of matter and energy, Tressa calls out the idea. Natural philosophers have discussed the concept. Merchants think the exact same way‍ ‍—‍ they wish to pin the great works of enchanters down as if they could be ledgered up in accounting books. It’s utter foolishness. Do conservation laws tell you when a novel runs out of words? Does the finite physicality of paint determining whether a chiaroscuro can stir the heart?

At this, Aurora gets flustered, stutters a jumble of words; she’s terrible at arguing.

Have you studies the great battles? Tress continues. They aren’t decided by which army runs out of bodies to spend like coin, but which side routes first‍ ‍—‍ and that is a matter of morale. Perhaps, were an enchantress to chant the same cantos from sunup to sundown without stopping, it would reveal some metaphysical gauge she might deplete. But what a tedious drudge it would be. Who would ever endure such work?

It has little relevance. Understand this: enchanters don’t fight to attrition.

Aurora finally concedes the point, and Tressa moves on to explaining other stuff

Enchantment requires attunement. Every living thing is attuned to their body: existence is continuous enchantment. Attuning to anything else is the true challenge of the art.

Morri Intro 

Along the roads, they come to a wooden blockade which Tressa doesn’t remember being there, and the pair are held up by a thickset girl Aurora’s age wielding a bow seeming too large for them. She claims to be a ranger who keeps these roads safe; thus, they are asked to pay a toll in order to proceed. Tressa suspects this is highway robbery, but she leaves the choice of how to proceed to Aurora.

Raised on stories of heroes battling bandits, Aurora immediately challenges the archer to stand down or face justice. When the ruse is up, the archer wastes no time in nocking an arrow.

Aurora was confident in her ability to take her, but as they fight, the archer fires blood‍-​enchanted arrows and trips Aurora with enchanted weeds; Aurora is outmatched. But by putting the principles the jeweler explained in practice, Aurora uses a lingering puddle from the storm to coats her skin in ice and resist the enchanted attacks, and rises victorious.

Tressa asks what Aurora wants to do now. The archer expects them to turn her in for her crimes in Willowind, but first Aurora asks why the archer is out here robbing people, and they learns that the archer’s mother had also died in the storm. Aurora sympathizes, and proposes that if the archer teams up to become a knight with Aurora, they can save people together. Aurora’s eyes shine with determination, and the girl stares into them.

The girl sighs and takes the chance she’s offer, introducing herself as Morri.

When they arrive in Willowind, first thing they notice is numerous houses have been destroyed by the storm; on the streets there are throngs of people with no where to go, discussing accommodations with their neighbors.

At the town’s market, the three shop for survival supplies‍ ‍—‍ but before they make any purchase, they are accosted by an angry friar spitting invective at Aurora.

Empty‍-​handed 

Still in the market, Tressa and Aurora try to push back against the the friar’s hostility. The girl just wants to be left alone. She’s done nothing wrong, still mourning the death of her dad, but the friar argues that Aurora clearly isn’t not human‍ ‍—‍ she’s a spirit: her hair glitters with alien light, her wounds close with ice‍ ‍—‍ and is it a coincidence she arrives after that evil, destructive storm?

He exclaims that she is the one who brought it upon them! A cometspawn devil, here to bring destruction as is the nature of comets. He speaks with a booming voice, inciting the crowd in the market. There’s tension in the town, people left vulnerable and desparate, and now Oleto has given them a scapegoat.

Tressa grabs the two kids and they flee. They aren’t safe in Willowind, but now they’re left unable to buy any supplies.

“How could I be a cometspawn?” Aurora asks. “Comets are just hunks of rock and ice, you can’t have a child with one, that doesn’t make any sense!”

The jeweler explains the history of cometspawn, and how so many of them have been killed in witch hunts.

Morri remarks, “Y’know, if you’re not human, that’s cool. I hate humans”

In the wilds beyond Willowind, the village’s farmlands are vanishing in the distance. The party struggles with hunger and the looming question of what can be done for shelter, but a curiosity lingers in Aurora, so she’s the one who asks: where exactly did Morri stay last night?

The other girl resists answering, not meeting anyone’s eye, drifting away from Aurora as they walk. When it’s clear she’s hiding something, she get self‍-​conscious of her dissembling, and just admits that yeah, her mother had a cabin in the woods.

Under Morri’s guidance, they ditch the roads for the forest, but Tressa stops them in front of a muddy patch, a barked order urging them to stand back.

She holds a gem, sings a word and it glows enchanted. She’s looking beyond it, staring intently at the ground. Soon a multi‍-​arm creature crawls hungrily out, mud studded with quartz like scales: a gemfiend!

The shape is like a sculptor gradually forgot the human form as madness overtook them, and its only will is hostility. As the gemfiend attacks, Tressa tells the girls to run.

They don’t listen (maybe Morri says something like, “Don’t worry, old lady, we’ve got this.”), and both leap into the fray.

Morri’s Cabin 

The fiend doesn’t even move when Aurora punches it, and only by instinctively freezing water on her skin does she protect herself from its massive counterattack. Morri’s unenchanted arrows bounce off, and she can’t compel any weeds. Aurora urges her to use her special arrows, but Morri defers vaguely, saying she shouldn’t.

The only thing that spares the kids from death is Tressa’s presence: she unsheaths a brilliant crystal sword, glowing with her will, and speaks the first named enchantment of the story, a major dictum: True Sundering Slash. Standing at a distance where it’s impossible for the blade even to connect, one swing of her sword severs the gemfiend in two, the pieces flying apart.

Awed, the teenagers demands she teach them how to do that.

The core of the gemfiend is now exposed, a black and glassy thing. Aurora points and says the gemfiend is starting to heal, but Tressa notes that it’s impossible. Gemfields can conjoin fragilely, but cracks can only be mended in the great furnace of the earth.

More twisted gemfiends crawl from the mud, an overwhelming crowd. But Tressa has another answer; she’s forced to use her Gravitas Loci, drawing a circle at a distance with her sword. Attuning her will to the earth, the line in the dirt expands outward with seismic ripples, and Tressa chants a verse invoking a thousand slashes.

Every gemfiends is ruded to a pile of dirt.

Tressa sags, and requires both girls supporting her to limb to the cabin.

At the abandoned cabin of Morri’s family, the party is greeted by a forest spirit in the form of a wolf clad in rough bark. A sap‍-​wet tongue lolls with a yip and its vine‍-​tail wags, it is happy see the archer, but its bark stands on end when it sees the newcomers.

Morri tells them to wait outside while she goes in to get supplies, but Tressa insists on coming in, speaking an enchantment that calms the timberwolf.

Morri claimed her mother was a ranger, but what’s inside belies this: an entire armory of weapons, crates piled with valuable of dubious utility to a ranger: jewelry, clothes, suspicious alchemical potions, and everywhere sat so many coins.

Tressa makes the connection first, and pulls out a bounty book, remarking on Morri’s resemblance to a wanted criminal. Morri counters that it’s weird for a backwater village’s jeweler to have a bounty book‍ ‍—‍ but it’s a weak argument; she’s seen what Tressa is capable of. What small‍-​town jeweler has mastered gemsinging and can manifest a Gravitas Loci?

So Morri slumps and fesses up, but the interrogation doesn’t end. Tressa finally asks about the enchantments placed on the arrows earlier. This, Morri doesn’t answer, but Tressa doens’t need her to. It was bloodcanting, one of the most forbidden arts in the kingdom.

Morri had worried about whether Aurora would judge her if she found her her mother was being a bandit and a witch, both incompatible with Aurora’s dream of being a knight.

But faced with this revelation, Aurora decides her new friendship with the other girl is too important to her, and she decides to look past it.

Bloodcanting, though, is a more severe offense. Tressa explains how dangerous and taboo it is, bt Morri’s isn’t really listening. The extent of her acknowledge is using this as a chance to demand Tressa teach her something to replace it. How about that epic sword slash?

Tressa refuses, and shifts the topic to what the pair of teens want, going forward, since they’d be unwelcome in town. They could live off the land (something Morri is all for), but Aurora still wants to be a knight, or at least find out who her mother was. But for this they need connections, so the plan is to travel to a nearby city. The baron lives in Brookbone, about a month’s travel from here.

Tressa also alludes to there being someone out there who might be able to train aurora, someone who knew her mother personally. (Perhaps she even drops the name: Daphni.)

Though the sun has not yet set, the jeweler will not teach them enchanting like she promises, nor will they begin journey to Brookbone just yet. No, they’ll simply stay in the cabin and rest for a while.

The pair of teens leave the cabin, claiming they’re leaving to play, and Tressa exacts a promise not to go fighting any gemfiends or spirits.

The truth is Morri suspects Tressa is hiding something. So they sneak back early to spy on her. They catch Tressa partially disrobed, enough to glimpse lifeless gray skin, a magical infection crawling over her, deepset in its terminal stages.

There’s an jewel‍-​cutting she holds, unfinished despite ornate angles and glimmering enchantment‍-​light. Tressa kneels in supplication, praying to the winds to ameliorate her pain just a little while longer, to give her strength to endure just long enough to, quote, ‘carry out Cassiopeia’s last wish.’

Training Arc 

For once, Aurora doesn’t dream of the place of desolation. Instead, she’s fighting Morri in a beautiful meadow. They’re older now, grown to full strength and wielding powerful enchantments. The fight is fiercely violent, but oddly not hostile‍ ‍—‍ rather, Aurora wants to cry out in exultation.

Then Tressa interrupts it, and suddenly the two of them are both fighting the jeweler. With their greater powers, they win, but when they attempt to resume their earlier fight, Morri falters. Aurora rushes to her side to discover lifeless gray creeping over her skin.

The infection spills out and stains the meadow. It crawls up her own skin. Aurora blinks and now she is alone. There is no meadow anymore, only a desolate wasteland from her feet to the horizon. Stars turn overhead. Closed eyes see hidden light.

In the fields outside of the archer’s cabin, Tressa is instructing Aurora while Morri watches. Tressa commands Morri to use her woodcanting to form a sword for Aurora to wield, while the jeweler enchants her crystal sword to not cut or bruise.

Aurora has fighting instincts, but she’s clueless in the art of the sword (the practice feels oddly confining for her), so jeweler has to start teaching from the very basics. When Morri asks for instructions, she gets brushed off, so the archer leaves to play with her timberwolf.

Once, Tressa remarks “Before I set out to train you, it had been years since I picked up my sword. Wielding the sword and wielding the chisel… they are fundamentally different. Why? The chisel creates beauty; the sword only destroys.” (Maybe Tressae kill an animal to demonstrate?)

“But Animals are just like jewels, aren’t they?” Aurora says. “I think it’s beautiful when you cut them up.”

This line freaks the other two out.

Once, in the shaded woods around the cabin, after Aurora has given up on training, she joins Morri in exploring. Morri’s annoyed at first, but she’s soon a little excited to show Aurora all the cool spots around here, all the trees and rocks she grew up climbing and hiding in.

They eventually catch the attention of the local forest spirit, a large squirrel with the upper half of a rocky monitor lizard, and Morri whispers a strangled warning to ‘not let her catch you’. They run as fast as they can.

Following Morri, Aurora navigates the woods well enough to evade capture, but it’s still summer, so she flags and faints. Morri could escape on her own, but instead she stops to pick up her new companion, carrying or dragging or supporting her as they continue to move. It slows her down massively, and renders most routes unviable, so Morri must take a dire chance: jumping off a sheer drop.

It’s enough to get the forest spirit off their back, but drop is too high. Morri screams from a broken leg‍ ‍—‍ she had shields Aurora from the worst of the fall, but the other girl falls from her arms and onto rocky ground, still getting cut up enough to cut up her flesh.

Morri has no choice, really: she breaks her half‍-​hearted promise to Tressa, and uses bloodcanting to heal herself, setting her bones and mending her flesh. But when she tries to heal Aurora, it doesn’t quite work. There’s something odd about this girl‍ ‍—‍ was that friar on to something? When Aurora wakes up, her wounds close with ice, and Morri mentions nothing to her.

Once, when they encounter some tiny gemfiends, and Tressa explains there’s the classification scheme the kingdom uses. It goes from ‘pebbleweight’ (any man could crush them if they were well‍-​prepared), then ‘stoneweight’ (only an enchanter stands a chance), then ‘boulderweight’ (only a gravitas‍-​level enchanter stands a chance), to finally ‘mountainweight’.

There are no more mountainweight gembeasts, not since the cometfall. Such things were so mighty only a comet could stand against them; even then, it was a protracted struggle. The comets were victorious over them in the end, though. In a way, we should almost thank them.

Days pass and they’re still in the fields around the cabin, the archer watching bored as the jeweler gives Aurora more instruction.

Tressa lectures:

“What every master of the sword must understand, and what is necessary to wield the True Sundering Arc, is that every cut has already been made. Every thing bears within it fractures, weakpoints. A thing which is whole cannot be cut, but everything is assembled of parts. Every cut must sever things at joints, unseen joints perhaps, but the master of the sword sees those joints. The eyes of the swordmaster are the eyes that sees everything already disserved; their sword is but a pen for writing out the truth.”

“That sounds a bit… sad.”

“Did you think it was a joyous thing, this violence? It is simply destruction. Perhaps you can appreciate it, perhaps it dazzles you, but it brings me only sorrow.”

At one point, Morri pleads for the jeweler to teach her something, but get rebuffed again, so she suggests instead Aurora puts what she’s learned into practice.

They fight with wooden swords, and Morri is able to match Aurora’s form blow for blow, almost as if she been practicing in secret, but though this was proposed as a spar, Morri fights Aurora with a ferocity that borders on killing intent.

She’s desperate to prove herself better than Aurora, worthy of Tressa’s teaching. Morri is bigger, stronger, and scrappier than Aurorora, but by now Aurora’s technique is more refined, and Morri finds she’s outmatched within the formalities of the duel.

One critical blow busts the other girl’s skin open, her lifeblood seeping from a wound, and subtly, droplets are allowed to fall on her weapon and enchant it. Like this, Morri turns the tides and she beats Aurora to the ground, standing unquestionably victorious. She meets Tressa’s gaze, and the the jeweler knows what she’s done.

Off‍-​balanced, indignant, Morri is half‍-​growing, half‍-​ranting. She babbles defenses of bloodcanting, lobs accusations of favoritism, demands to know what happened to their plans of heading to a nearby city.

But infuriatingly, Tressa doesn’t argue with her, just silently, placidly watching the girl get red in the face. So Morri snaps, and says fuck it, fuck this. She doesn’t care anymore. The two of them can go on whatever important heroic adventure they want, but leave her out of it. And get the fuck out of her cabin.

Need 

Alone with the jeweler outside the cabin, Aurora asks why. But Tressa ignores this, and mentions that if you begged, Morri might be willing to let you alone live with her. You could be safe here. This prompts Aurora to make a decision about what she really wants‍ ‍—‍ she likes Morri a lot, but… if Morri is going just going to be a bandit… that’s not Aurora’s dream.

So Aurora remains committed to following Tressa. Internally, Aurora thinks she wants to know who Cassiopeia is and what Tressa knew about her. The jeweler has so many secrets.

Still, Aurora demands to know why Tressa wouldn’t just teach Morri something. So Tressa explains that Morri was jealous of Aurora. And if the jeweler fed that hunger of hers, entertained her desire to one‍-​up Aurora, there’d be no end of that. Ultimately, there are things Aurora will be capable of that Morri never will be.

But Aurora says she still could have offered her something. And the true answer is this: Tressa doesn’t care. Morri isn’t her child and she owes her nothing.

But… Aurora reaches for other excuses. Will Morri be able to survive here on her own? Tressa says that the archer has the favor of the local spirits, and knows how to survive. “But you don’t. Let’s get moving.”

Still Aurora seeks so sort of consolation. “How can I not be sad? I just lost my first friend.”

“You lost your father, didn’t you? You’ll get over it. Every relationship ends, one way or another. You can’t be surprised when things fall apart.”

“Relationships don’t have to fall apart. Some people are together forever!”

Tressa snorts. “And then they die.”

“Why do you say things like that, Tressa? You sound like you’re sad all the time. You look sad all the time. Is something wrong with you?”

“It’s the truth. It’s what you see when you witness the world with the eyes of a sword.”

“So it’s just death and destruction forever? You see nothing? How is that any different from just closing your eyes?”

“It’s more like… a downpour. It has all the inevitability of gravity. The universe is forever tearing itself apart and the pieces will just fall down, down, down. It’s all the there is.”

“If you can’t see something worth smiling about, then it is like closing your eyes! It makes you blind.”

“It’s not just a downpour, you’re right. But joy, love, meaning, is nothing more than flashes of lightning in endless rainfall. In the end, we all drown in it.”

Traveling with the jeweler, Aurora dreams of the desolate place every night. There is one exception, when she dreams herself alone in the meadow. The lifeless creeping gray is still there, and Aurora watches it without fear. It’s visual static, what you see when closing your eyes in a dark room. Eigengrau.

There’s an ache in her bones, which surprises her‍ ‍—‍ she’s never felt pain in a dream before. The eigengrau reaches her toes and starts crawling up her skin. She feels numb where it passes. It’s a relief, and she lets it proceed.

She can’t see her skin where it has passed, it’s just gray like the rest of it. It continues upward. Her whole body is numb, and feels like an out‍-​of‍-​body‍-​experience. Her skin is going gray now. When it reaches her eyes, her vision goes dark at the edges and she awakes with a jolt. It’s the middle of the night, and she never manages to get back to sleep.

Sometimes, before she goes to sleep, Aurora sees the jeweler cutting a large, ornate gem. The glimpses of it she manages to see lead her to think the finished product would be truly remarkable.

The forest trails lead to a clearing where Tressa attempts to continue Aurora’s training. But Aurora is depressed, unwilling to continue. She hasn’t been putting much effort into her lessons. (She’s lonely, missing Morri, but only Tressa realizes what it is.)

One day, they encounter an injured man. (Something about his injury reminds aurora of the dark, glassy gemfiends they’ve been encountering.) He pleads for them to help him.

Tressa examines his condition, and walks Aurora through some reasoning. She notes how neither of them know any healing arts. She notes how far they are from a major city, and how carrying him would slow them even further. She notes how the man is in pain.

She asks Aurora what they should do. Obviously, Aurora thinks they should try to save them.

“And if there’s no way to save him?”

Aurora imagines the man was her father instead. If Aurora had returned home even a little bit earlier, before Geller had died. And what if being few minutes quicker wasn’t enough? If she still wouldn’t manage to save him? Contemplating it only strengthens her resolve. You have to try. Do anything, find some way to save them, until it’s too late.

“Aurora?”

“Yes, teacher?”

“It is too late. Kill him.”

Aurora is shocked, sputtering outrage.

“Let this be a lesson. If you intend to save people, you have to know who you can’t save and when. Some men are already dead, even as they draw breath.” There’s a bitter, intimate tone to saying that, like she’s thinking of someone specific. “Look with the eyes of a sword, Aurora. See the cut you have to make. See that it’s already severed, and reveal that truth.”

But Aurora can’t do it. She looks at this man, still glowing with life, and she doesn’t want to see him already dead, doesn’t want to make that true.

“I can’t.”

“One day, you’ll have to.”

Tressa lifts her sword. True Sundering Slash.

And it was done.

It’s been days now and Tressa is getting sick of Aurora’s attitude. So she snaps. She reminds Aurora that her father died because she was too weak, and this how motivated she is to fix that? Maybe Morri was right to cut her loses and leave her‍ ‍—‍ maybe Morri knew Tressa was focusing her attention on the wrong one. She tells Aurora she don’t deserve her teaching, and leaves her alone in a clearing one day.

That night, Aurora stares up at the sky. She nods off a bit, and starts dreaming about Morri petting her timberwolf in a cabin that looks so empty with just herself in it. The vision is so vivid it’s like she’s really seeing her.

She shakes herself out of it, awaking as if from a hypnic jerk. She picks up her practice sword, and does nothing with it. But Tressa’s words, reminding her of her father’s death, are still echoing on her head.

Aurora gets upset, it makes ehr mad enough she can feel herself getting hot even in the cool night air‍ ‍—‍ and then she feels it, the voice of something else speaking to her. She feels her perspective broaden, priorities clicking into place. Aurora gets up and starts practicing her sword forms for as long as the stars shine upon her‍ ‍—‍ it’s like she doesn’t need sleep.

Waste 

In the morning, Aurora finds and demonstrates her forms to a freshly‍-​awoken Tressa. Aurora is anxious, knowing the jeweler will find fault in her, thinking she might have irreparably lost a mentor. She’s nervous enough to botch a few forms, bursting with energy. But when it’s done, Tressa says nothing. She tosses the crystal sword at a confused Aurora. So she explains: Aurora wanted to learn True Sundering Slash, didn’t she?

There’s not much real enchantment to be done with a wooden practice, certainly not with Aurora’s awful affinity for earth magic, so Tressa instructs her in the basics of gembinding, how to use crystal swords to cut sharper, to block strikes without budging. The jeweler’s signature technique is far out of her reach, but this is the groundwork.

“There are two canto called ‘True Sundering Arc,’ ” she explains.

“That’s confusing. What’s the difference?”

A nod. “One is true, and one is false.”

“Then why are they both called true?”

“What else would a lie call itself?”

“Fine, what do they do different.”

“It’s very subtle, some may say there’s no difference at all. The True Sundering Arc cuts anything you want to cut, from any distance. And the True Sundering Arc cuts anything you wanted to cut, from any distance.”

“Did you repeat yourself?”

“Perhaps I did.”

And the journey continues, slowly, as they spend hours each day refining Aurora’s sword magic. Tressa still works on cutting her ornate masterwork jewel with her enchanted chisel. Every day as she’s going to sleep, Aurora dreams of Morri, seeing her wandering the woods astride her timberwolf.

Aurora still dreams of the desolate place, sometimes, but she simply turns her gaze upward, and tries to trace constellations with stars, remembering the stories her father told her. She peers until she sees a wolf, a bow, a pretty girl.

This lasts until one day, the jeweler is in too much pain to get up after an encounter with the black, glassy gemfiends they’ve been encountering more and more of.

No training today. Aurora is worried, but knows nothing about healing, so she goes hunting for food to make her mentor a soup of some sort, her mind turning over plans of how she’d get Tressa to a royal lifecanter.

The girl is able to catch a few rabbits, but eventually happens across an odd minty fruit, and she wonders if it has healing properties. So she picks a few to carry back, but doing this incites the anger of a forest spirit. It’s large, larger than the farm spirits she used to wrestle.

Aurora unsheaths the crystal sword and readies an enchantment. Her form is markedly better, her gleaming blade can slice cleanly through tree boughs, but the forest spirit has the form of a vulture with wings of blinding sunshine sheathed in bladed agave leafs. It gracefully evades her strikes, and it flies so fast Aurora has no hope of running. So it goes in for a killing swoop.

Then an arrow strikes it, knocking it from its path. A familiar timber wolf comes bounding in, and Morri alights. “You’re hopeless without me, aren’t you?” But before they can reunite, the bird gets up. Yet Morri does not make a second attack. She talks to the spirit, negotiating mercy for Aurora at a price: a blood offering. Aurora is reluctant (Bloodcanting is evil), but she’s excited enough to see the archer again that she goes along with it.

Perhaps Morri mentions that the spirit attacked Aurora because it strange gemfiends roving through and uprooting its trees has left it on edge.

Back at their camp, the archer taunts the jeweler. “You look even worse than she said you would, damn.” Tressa is in enough pain that no retort comes to her lips. Before Aurora can chastise her, Morri surprises them both by correctly diagnosing her condition: wasteblight, a disease of the will that afflicts powerful enchanters.

There’s herbal remedies to stave it off (and Morri, suspecting her condition, had gathered some of them before coming here). Nothing she has can cure it, nothing can cure it as far as she knows. “Except for the queen’s last spell, I guess. And the royal family guards that shit like it’s fucking treasure, not a life‍-​saving treatment.”

Tressa feels better, and Morri holds it over her head. The witchling saved the jeweler’s life, a little bit at least, so there’s no excuse to treat her as not worth teaching.

Tressa still refuses to teach her sword or gem arts‍ ‍—‍ no, instead, the jeweler lectures her about flowerbinding, the means by which a greenweaver can replicate in small part the sunbinding incantations of forest spirits. It’s a worthy apology; this is the sort of fancy shit Morri never thought she’d see, let alone practice.

Days pass and the training of both of them continue. As the chapter closes, it’s almost been a month since this journey began. The moon’s waxing full again, and every day Aurora’s unease grows deeper and deeper, the pale moon hanging above edged like a sword.

At night, in her recurring dream, the sun rises to its apex in the desolate place. Aurora has always felt trapped in the desolate place.

But now it feels like she is floating.

Slash 

The party finally comes to the source of the strange gemfiends, a tree that was struck by lightning in the storm last month, forming a phytofulgurite, resulting in a creature half‍-​gemfiend, half‍-​spirit.

They see a bit obelisk growing from the tree’s corpse, and Aurora fights off some of the gemfiends milling around, approaching the obelisk. Tressa holds back Morri from following after. Aurora goes to the obelisk, tries to talk to the deformed spirit, but Aurora is mad at the thing for killing and hurting people, and can’t resist calling it out.

Her words incite the spirit. The ground shakes, and then a gargantuan beast of root and rock emerges from the earth. Aurora futilely swings her sword at it, but she’s flung back like flicked pebble.

Tressa and Morri had stayed clear of the thing. Once Aurora is far from it, Tressa has her face set in determination. She uses True Sundering Arc to carve a huge circle in the earth, and attunes to expand it. Not ripples, this time, but massive waves through the earth.

Tressa begins chanting. The full chant, and neither girl has ever heard every verse of her gravitas.

A thousand slashes, and her sword parts flesh from bone.

Two thousand slashes more, and her sword turns metal to dust.

Three thousand slashes more, and her sword parts life and will, a thunderous roar in which no enchantment can remain.

Four thousand slashes more, and by her sword every beam of light itself is split. Cut and cut and cut until darkness falls.

Ten thousand slashes to bring it all down; a star‍-​rending storm unto total destruction.

Let everything that falls to earth go like the dying of the light

Gravitas Loci: Star‍-​rending Storm!

What tressa did is impossible on so many levels. The thing, the monster, it… it’s gone. Gone. Morri’s awestruck, and more than a little terrified.

Aurora’s like, “But I thought enchanters couldn’t defeat spirits.”

Tressa smiles. “The very best of the best can.”

“You didn’t just beat it,” Morri says. “You destroyed it. Did its light even return to the continuum?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve only unleashed all ten thousand slashes once before this. One thousand is enough to kill most things.”

“So this is your true potential?” (Aurora is squeeing as she asks?)

“No, I think I could push it further. Five thousand more, and perhaps I could cleave meaning itself. But what would be the point? Ten thousand is enough to destroy anything in the universe.”

“Anything?”

“Give me a place to stand, and I’d carve the world in half.”

“I don’t think even the king could do that. Are you… are you the most powerful enchanter in the kingdom?”

“Hardly. I’m just a pathetic old woman. What great works have I done?”

“But with power like this, you could do anything.”

“Who wants to do anything?”

Truth 

The winds howl in this part of the country, where the hills crop up as rocky prominences with trees aas mere dead outlines.

The three of them travel through the valleys. The clouds have come early, drenching the land in shadow for days now. Between the wind and the shade, it’s gotten chilly. Aurora likes it, but once the other two complain, they agree to take shelter in a cave.

Conversation flows between the three of them easier than ever, Morri having gotten over her problems with both Aurora and Tressa. They trade stories. (Exposit here, perhaps, about the queen who banished the comets, or the empire that created gemfiends, or man who sired the first dryad).

Throughout it all, Aurora is on edge. The full moon rises, finally, and not a moment later does the dam break, and a new storn commencing. Ball lightning descends from the heavens, and hail beats vast percussion on the rocky cliffs. In their cave, the campfire goes out, and the chill creeps in with wild abandon. But it’s not coming from outside‍ ‍—‍ mist has draped Aurora. Just as she froze the pond last full moon, she’s freezing the air around her now.

The chill is too much for the jeweler, and her wasteblight condition is aggravated by the unrelenting cold‍ ‍—‍ but she has a plan. She commands Aurora to pick up the crystal sword, echoing the instructions she’s given so many times: “Bind your will to blade and control yourself, Aurora. There’s no other way.”

Like this, they fight, like that, Aurora struggling to channel her will into the crystal instead of freezing the air around them. In this fight, Aurora has to demonstrates everything she’s learned in a month under Tressa’s tutelage.

Tressa attacks are relentless. This is no spar; Aurora has to legit fight for her life.

Tressa says, “There’s only one thing I could ever teach you, Aurora, and that’s how to fight when the world is trying to kill you. It is trying, and I’m the least of your worries. Live through your sword or die to another’s, that’s the truth I reveal to you.”

Tressa attacks her hard enough that Morri tries to intervene and save her, and Tressa hits her with a near‍-​lethal hit. At this, Aurora snaps. Morri is dying. Tressa is dying. Aurora has a sword to her throat.

Everyone’s dying. What was the point? Was it all going to be wasted motion, in the end? What did any of this mean?

And then, Aurora finally sees it. The world witnessed through the eyes of a sword, everything already sundered. The endless downpour of the universe tearing itself apart. Aurora strikes out, and she strikes with enchantment.

Silent Sundering!

Tressa’s prosthetic hand and all its enchantments are destroyed by the attack.

“Now you finally see it. But it’s not good enough. Do it again.”

Tressa comes at her with more enchanted gemstones, and Aurora has to sunder them all. Shards are falling to the ground. Aurora gets into a rhythm, but then an attack is powered by Tressa alone, and no gem. When she takes aim at the source for another sundering, she’s aiming at Tressa. She nearly kills her mentor before she catches herself.

“Why did you stop?”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

Tressa only gives a small, sad smile.

Aurora know that smile. And then, she knew. There was nothing more to teach. “This was always going to be my final lesson. You never expected to walk out of this cave at all, did you?”

“In the end, it would make a fine urn.”

“Tressa, please, you have to hope that—”

“Hope for what? Why? Why should I live?” Tressa shakes her head. “I haven’t been a good teacher to you. I haven’t even been a good person.”

“You can change. Find a wound in the world, and devote yourself to fixing it. Isn’t that what you told me?”

She points her sword at Morri, and Aurora tenses. “How far do I need to go before you’ll stop me? Once I kill her? If I try to kill you? Do you know how many heads I’ve parted from bodies? Do you think they all deserved it? Do you think this violence brings anyone any joy?” Her voice was getting louder. She laughs terrible. “Do you think my cuts were always true?”

Aurora remains resolute, mouth settling into a determined line.

“How, Aurora? How can you expect to achieve greatness if you aren’t strong enough… to kill your own teacher?” She’s trailing off with those last words. // Aurora wonders if Tressa’s still talking to her.

Maybe Tressa explains: “That’s when I first saw with swordsight. My teacher, I had discovered she’d executed an entire family for treason, for conspiring against the crown. Civilians. Children. I had to cut him down. That’s the wound I set out to fix. After that… I had nothing. Nothing for me to do but watch the world tear itself apart, perhaps make it happen a little faster. That endless downpour…”

“But the flashes make it worth it.”

“Cassiopeia was the brightest flash I’d ever seen. She was dazzling…”

“I’ve decided what my purpose is,” Aurora says. “The wound I’m going to heal? I’m going to save everyone. No more death.”

“That’s… ridiculous. You can’t save everyone.”

“If there’s always more people to save, it means I’ll never be left with nothing to do. We’ll never be left with nothing to do.”

“I’m dying, Aurora.”

“I’m going to save everyone, and that starts with you, Tressa.”

Her mentor just laughs again at the absurdity. “Everything I tried to teach you, and I still ended up with a foolish idealist. The world is going to ruin you, Aurora. You aren’t ready.”

“Being ready to die isn’t any better. Is this really all you want out of life?”

“It didn’t mean anything in the end. We, us mortals, we’re already dead. The nature of comets is to dazzle and destroy. I suppose I can be happy enough to have witnessed that light.”

By now the jeweler’s will has faded enough the eigengrau complexion of a terminal case of wasteblight is visible on her face.

There’s no hope for them to reach a royal lifecanter in time, if they could even afford help. But before her mentor dies, she has something to tell Aurora. There’s a reason Tressa had the will to survive wasteblight for so long, after all.

She holds up a brilliant diamond, the thing she’d been chiselling, glowing with light. “I was given a command, a purpose, and I bound it into this gem, and so long as I pursued that purpose, I retained the will to hold on.” That command was given by Aurora’s mother. Tressa hands the gem to Aurora now, and within that light there is a memory.

Aurora sees her mother, for the first time. A pale figure with only a distant hint of humanity on her face; eyes glowing with alien light, shimmering prismatic hair more like a ethereal mist, and it’s as if no blood flushes beneath her skin.

Cassiopeia sits chained in the royal dungeons, and Tressa has infiltrated them in an attempt to free her.

The two of them argue. Tressa came here to rescue Cassiopeia, but she refuses to leave: if she left, then there would be no end to the crown hunting her. She doesn’t want that life.

Instead, Cassiopedia reveals her secret: a newborn child; she’d concealed her pregnancy from even her closest friend. Tressa is given a mission: take the child to its father, and keep the truth of her mother a secret. “But you must tell her who I am, when the time is right.”

Tressa continues to argue‍ ‍—‍ does she want this child to grow up without a mother?

“She must.”

But if Tressa leaves Cassiopeia here, what happens to her?

She say, “I die.”

And Tressa replies: “I didn’t know comets could die.”

With those words, Aurora can have no illusions left; she is (literally) frozen solid by this confirmation. She really wasn’t human, but cometspawn.

Despite all of her frustration at Tressa’s secrecy, it was necessary for her mentor to live‍ ‍—‍ telling Aurora when the time was right was part of the her mother’s final command, what gave her strength.

But Aurora’s shock thaws for just long enough to ask one thing of the dying jeweler: “Why was my mother in the dungeons? What did she do? Was she… an evil comet?”

And the reply, more of a coughed whisper: “No. No, your mother… was justified. She had to—”

But there’s no one speaking anymore, just a lifeless gray, wasteblighted husk.

Aurora is no longer frozen. She feels hot, melting from rage, and her sword is still in her hand, still enchanted with her will, and she strikes out at the next thing that moves‍ ‍—‍ but it was Morri.

Her sword splits a great wound on the shivering girl. But Morri uses that blood to weave an enchantment, warming her flesh, sparing it from the storm and ice around Aurora.

The archer steps closer, Aurora flinches back, scared of the other girl’s retaliation, scared of herself and what else she might do by accident, but Morri lunges forward suddenly.

It’s a hug.

As the storm rages on outside the cave, Aurora and the archer hold on to each other. The archer says: “So, you know, now?” referring to Aurora’s mother. She continues “My parents… they weren’t rangers, they were bandits. But yours were good people, weren’t they? Yeah, you mean something. You’re so much more important than me, aren’t you?”

Aurora replies, “No. If I’m important, what does that make you? I’d be dead without you. I want to know what happened with my mother. I want so many answers. But… if you still just want to go be bandits in the woods or something… can we um, at least be bandits that help people?”

“Eh, we’ll figure it out in the morning.”