gift from above - Printable Version

No sooner had Wilder arrived than the rift began to hum and pulse. Mere moments later, a small fabric bag--tied with a twine drawstring--came tumbling out, landing with a series of little clicks at her paws.

The string was not tied shut, so it wouldn't take much for her to open it--but what was within did not feel magical at all. Instead, a series of pebbles lay within, looking like little more than pretty little stones that perhaps someone had collected over the years. Yet upon closer inspection, Wilder would find a series of tiny scenes painted on them--some simple, some surprisingly detailed.

There was a gray pebble, crudely painted with a scene of ice and snow.
Next was a tiny brown stone, with a depiction of a farm upon it.
A streaked, multicolored rock had a framed "painting" dotted on in tiny strokes.
A little reddish pebble had a spear painted on it.
A white pebble showed a mountain, gray and pale with snow.
A gray-violet stone showed a mountain peak, with a stormcloud behind it.
Lastly there was a yellow-green rock, this one translucent, with a scene of a village beside a seashore.

Though the stones were not magical at all, surely the Wishing Stone had sent Wilder to them for a reason..? Perhaps she had some form of magic of her own that could unlock their secrets?

She arrived just in time, the humming and pulsing sending her fur puffing out with excitement, almost on her toes as she waited on edge for her gift. When the little bag came tumbling out she fell upon it immediately, fumbling with the string to get it open. It didn't take her long to get the bag open and the fabric fell away to reveal its contents.

At first, opening the bag and seeing what seemed to be wholly unmagical stones was a little....disappointing. She'd thought that there would be some kind of magical glass that would let her see the world or...well, she didn't really know what to expect, but there had to be more to these then what met the eye. She leaned down, sniffing them carefully and poking them experimentally to see if anything would happen. When nothing did, she carefully pawed the white one one out of the pile and looked closer at the markings on it. At first it took her a moment, but then she realized that it was in a shape similar to the mountain she'd been on with Tamulus. Gray rock, dotted with snow. She sniffed it curiously, wondering what it could mean and what the wishing stone had meant when it had given this to her.

But then an idea came to her - if these pebbles were from Let and they depicted the scenes where they'd been found...then she knew exactly how to unlock their secrets. She touched her nose carefully to the rock and beckoned magic to give her a glimpse of where they'd been.

At once, though her cast was relatively weak, Wilder was thrown back into magical memory. The crisp bite of fresh, icy air tantalized her nose; the sound of snow crunching underfoot, and the vision of a real sky high above, swept through her mind, eclipsing the cave around her. Someone's steaming breath, coming in pants, plumed out before her.

The vision didn't last long, but what was there was potent; each stone had been carefully collected from Let's surface, and cherished, only to be discarded. Luckily they were not lost: Wilder, hopefully, would cherish them as much as their previous owner had.

Wilder receives: Let Stone Collection. The tiny stones, little more than pebbles, each come from a different portion of Let. She may see glimpses of the following with a successful Hindsight on these stones; a Hindsight roll of 18+ may, if desired, be GM tagged for potentially more detailed information.

Grey - A landscape of ice and snow is crudely painted on this pebble. Touching it may bring fleeting memories of similar landscapes, the crisp scent of snow on fresh air, and visions of people dressed in thick clothes.

Brown - A farm is painted on this pebble. This pebble offers odors of rich earth and plants, and the sounds and sights of agriculture and trade.

Streaked - This multicolored pebble has a framed 'painting' painted on in tiny strokes. Visions of a people engaging in the arts--theatre and sculpture, painting and music--come to mind when this one's memories are accessed.

Red - A spear is painted on this pebble, and memories of warm landscape and a warlike people are housed within. Blood and steel, conquerors and wars, and all the sensations that come with it, can be remembered at its touch.

White - A mountain is painted on this pebble. Crisp air, vast expanses of mountains, and sparse foliage combine with brief images of tough living.

Gray-Violet - This pebble shows only vague, brief glimpses of strangers gathering among the highest mountain peaks; it holds a strange feeling like the echo of distant magic. A stormcloud always looms in the distance.

Yellow-Green - A village along a shoreline, with sounds and scents of sea and fishing, and people going about their villager business.

The sudden change as she was swept into the memory was jarring but she was suddenly staring, wide-eyed, at a familiar scene. Not the same, as there was more snow and it was far colder, but the mountains stretched before her and a sky, a real, incredible, beautiful sky stretched high above her. She didn't get long to look at it before she was thrown back into the caves, but it was enough.

She was frozen in place for a moment, staring at the rock in front of her before she scrambled to grab at another one, the gray-violet one, and did the same. Her eagerness threw herself strongly through the magic, opening to a scene of another mountain - different this time, with a stormcloud beyond (a stormcloud, that was a stormcloud!!) and people gathered. She tried to hear more, see more, lingering longer then before to drink in as much of the memory as she could.

It would be unfortunate that Wilder was so successful with her magic. Whereas the visions—memories—this stone held were mostly good, it was haunted by a cataclysmic storm. Had Wilder been any less of a mage than she was, she might have seen idyllic memories of a sheltered valley that bustled with the life of hidden witches, the storm rumbling in the distance, unable to be shaken by the original bearer whose daylong dreams were eaten by a single nightmare that forever tainted and haunted the rest...

Children were busy laughing, running through the grass and chasing a handmade leather ball, happy to stretch their legs after a long winter. It seemed as if one team of children fought for the ball with their feet against another team; one of the boys, his brown hair streaked with a patch of white, succeeded in outplaying his opponent and managed to sink the ball into a hollow well beneath a holekeeper's feet. He was ecstatic! Bright, lightning blue eyes turned to view the gathered crowd of adults, some cheered for him, others gave warm words of encouragement to the other children.

But beyond them, a flock of birds burst from the forest in the scattered, frenzied way that wild animals flee danger—and the valley shook with a lurching quake and a sharp peal of thunder that crawled through the ground until it erupted into a single, deafening roar. They had all been knocked momentarily to the grass, and as they pulled themselves to their feet to mutter and wonder at the stillness that followed after, they were not left to wonder long.

A distant rumbling from beyond the peaks suggested a storm despite their clear, spring sky—but a cluster of dark, gray clouds began to roll in from all sides, surrounding the valley until it suffocated all of the light from the sky, the air saturated with heavy static and crooked, growing fingers of condensation.

Then came the third crack of thunder, and everything shook.

Some of the children cupped their hands to their ears, some fell, others braced against the ground or by accompanying adults as to not lose balance. It did not take long for them to scatter, afraid, like the birds. One mother scooped her son into her arms—he was too big for her to carry like that anymore, but she ran with him anyway—and from the memory's perspective, his bright blue eyes disappeared into the forest as sheets of iron rain enclosed the valley; as the shadows swallowed him and his mother, the memory-bearer caught a final glance at the strange streak of white hair bobbing with his mother's struggling gait.

But the bearer would need to flee too, and even as she tried, her eyes cast upward to view the dark clouds rolling over themselves, consuming others to grow larger and more menacing. Flashes of lightning lit the atmosphere with cold pink light, illuminating the drops of rain that finally closed in on the valley. Screams rose into the air, challenging the bursts of thunder, as droplets of water, droplets of ice, and acid, and fire, and plasma burned into the skin of those unlucky enough to still be outside—but even those who had sought shelter were not safe as a whipping wind sliced through homes, using the water like blades. Grass and dirt pulled away from itself, the ground splitting with a shattering howl. Pillars of stone groaned as they tore apart as the rain continued to burn its victims.

And the air... swirling with color she could not describe, but it shimmered in her memory like an aurora whose appearance did not strike awe and wonder into her, but fear. Primal, instilled in her and in everyone else—it was more than an unknown, more than a threat. It was death. A piece of her brain could recognize that without having ever seen this before. Streaks of hot, white lightning birthed swirls of scathing fire that began to eat their home alive as the thunder and the chaos consumed the valley whole.

Terror. Fear. Death.

Escape. She had to flee. She had to flee, she had to—

A final clap of thunder tore Wilder from the memory as the ground opened to swallow her after another landscape-altering quake...

Lingering in the quiet dark that came after was the feeling of something familiar to Wilder in ways she would not be able to describe:

For the memory-bearer, the feeling was sadness, the taste of the magic new on her tongue but not far from what she knew herself; something had changed deep within the core of their moon, its magic free and wild and hungry.

But for Wilder, the feeling was birth... THE GREAT AWAKENING.

At first she was fooled into thinking it was a simple memory, of a village of witches hidden within the mountains. Away from that Empire, most likely. But it all happened to quickly. Devolved into chaos, destruction. Terror and fear spread through the witches and Wilder cried for them as they screamed, skin burning and forms falling beneath the downpour of wild, untamed magic falling from that beautiful sky. And when she was wrenched from the vision with understanding like blood on her tongue, she cried out and swept the rock away, hearing it clatter over the floor of Gemini.

She crouched in place for a moment, eyes wide and shivering, the elation of obtaining her stone collection at first completely smothered by the horror of the vision. She had not known Let to be so...dangerous. She had only known it as a beautiful world with some evil in it, but the force of magic that had swept through the village and decimated it was something else entirely. Unfortunately, something horribly familiar.

That was us!
The Spire, awakening Gembound from their sleep. Tamulus had said that it had taken a huge toll on the magic of Let for the Spire to change them to "earth animals" and reawaken them from their slumber. And that memory was it - the effect that the magic had had on the surface of Let. She knew it, deep down, as the crackle of lightning across the sky and the magic that shimmered in the air was like the stream of magic that had tore through her veins upon her hatching. Familiar, hauntingly so, and it saddened her deeply that their birth had caused so much death.

After a moment of thinking and calming down from the horrific memory, she slowly stood up and stepped back over to the pebble, regarding it for a moment with a flash of fear, before she carefully pawed it back to the others. Even if it was such a dark memory, it was still important and a fragment of Let to keep her company in the caves. She glanced at the others, wondering if they, too, held such dark things. She would have to investigate in the days to come.

She carefully folded the cloth back up and deftly tied the string to secure it together, lifting it in her mouth and trotting away with her gift. Thank you, Wishing Stone. I'll be back.
*exit