The world swam murky, the sound of approaching steps thudding up behind Wilder. But should she turn to look, it was not a visitor in the here-and-now; instead, the vision of crystals shifted.

Not much was different, except that two indistinct figures were striding past. One was a mere blur, but it had finished speaking--a commanding voice discussing... something of import, something in a businesslike voice, something lost to the vision and sliding away on the stream of time.

The second figure, a vision of gold-edged black, glanced to it with a face made of dark-tipped pale arms, wings splayed above it in feathered grandeur. "We will seal it, then. As a precautionary measure. Collapse Tunnel T to begin with; they will be locked away..." The voice faded, even as the other moved to answer, the figures striding off through the crystalline labyrinth and away.

The only indication that Wilder had returned to now was the lingering silence--and the hulking dragon reappearing beside her, staring down and waiting.

@Wilder

Wilder stepped away from the wall, mildly disappointed in what the vision had shown her. It hadn’t been any kind of clue as to what the purpose of Gemini was or what had happened here in the past. Although it was interesting enough hearing the voices from long ago discussing the collapsing of the tunnel (perhaps to stop the spread of Order), it wasn’t what she’d been looking for. If only she could direct what she was looking for into her magic.

She glanced back up at Dread after a moment of silence, realizing he’d asked her about the fighting here. ”Oh, right - there was…honestly I couldn’t tell, some of them were hidden or small. But there was…” her eyes narrowed for a moment as she thought about it. ”Maybe…six of them? Seven? There were only a few of us, so they overpowered us pretty quickly. Especially when those big insect things showed up. We had to run.” She shuddered, remembering the terrifying presence of the Praetors. ”Most of them were small, but they had spellcasters. Spells I’ve never seen before. I didn’t know until then that Order was its own…kind of magic.”

When Dread began to falter in his magic, Wilder turned to an unturned patch of fungus and really really focused. The hollowness was still there, ever-present after her Transcendence, but it didn’t make it impossible to be as strong as before.

With all of her effort put into a single spell, she focuse on a small part of the crystal floor and in a flash of powerful magic at last pouring from her body, the crystal burned white-hot and blindingly bright. It was small, but the plasma was hot enough that the surrounding fungus immediately began to burn away.

She purred, proud of herself for finally being able to get it to work again. ”I haven’t been able to do that for a while.”

@Dread

Dread tipped his head to one side, then blinked and shook his thoughts away. Six or seven didn't seem like a lot, but then, Wilder was very small. Still-... her magic, as he was abruptly shown, wasn't weak, either. He squinted and shook his head, waiting away the blinding afterimages.

"WHY?" he demanded--and then blinked again as he realized his question was probably very unclear. "-COULD YOU NOT DO THAT?" He knew Bug had magic, and it was magic that wasn't his, so it must have been Wilder's; but Bug's had always been a minor magic, that of tricksters, with more "whispering and moving small objects as a prank" and less "overwhelming fiery destruction." But what Wilder now displayed was quite aligned with the latter, and he wondered at it.

He turned, then, another blast of flame--briefer, more haphazard--scouring mold away from a larger boulder. I SHOULD GO TO ERIDANUS, he thought, not for the first time; that cave would burn far better.

@Wilder

Pleased with the burning hot white plasma that she'd created, singing the nearby fungus to nothing, Wilder cast out her mind and grasped the burning fire as best she could. It was hard to hold plasma, it was more like picking up the crystal it was currently obliterating and flinging it to the side before it all burned away.

It worked well enough, a tiny sun being flung across the room, low to the ground, fungus and mold getting singed and some lighting on fire from the sheer heat. It was brief, a few seconds of tossing it around, before the plasma burned itself out and the light retreated, leaving a few small fires in its wake and a lot of smoke and ash.

She sneezed as some of the burnt fungus drifted their way before breaking apart into dust and nothing, but it had felt good. The hollowness was retreating, for now.

"I saw someone," she explained, sitting down to give her face a quick wash before she sneezed any more. "His name's Emuh. He did some...test and when I passed he did something to me. Ever since then I haven't been able to use magic the same way - it's a lot harder. He promised it would get better, though." She was thankful she'd waited until after the fighting to take her transcendence trial - she would have been a whole lot more useless in the state she was in if she hadn't.

@Dread

It took him a moment to recognize what Wilder was talking about. As he listened, he waddled toward a more distant geode, inhaling.

Another guttering blast of flame joined the black cat's own blazing supernova, and as it finished, Dread rocked back on his wings. Her words were only now ticking off memories in his mind, and he turned, tilting his head and blinking down at her. "I HAVE DONE THAT," he realized aloud. "IT DOES GET BETTER! IT WAS TERRIBLE FOR AWHILE. MY SON'S SON WAS WEAK FOR MANY CYCLES AFTER." Blight had been a magical wreck for far too long. Dread? Dread breathed way too much flame to have taken long in readjusting. "I THINK THE MORE YOU USE IT THE BETTER IT GETS. LIKE WINGS," he explained.

Maybe "wing muscles" weren't the best metaphor for a cat, but Dread's conversational empathy had its limits.

A question occurred to him, and he glanced at Wilder again. "WHY DO YOU FIGHT THE HIVE?" he asked, curiosity behind the words. He knew why he did--it kept messing with his stuff--but her? Had it done something bad to her?

@Wilder

It was a heavy relief that the experience of testing and weakening, the hollow pit inside her chest, would one day (hopefully soon) resolve itself. She just...had to keep going. Keep pressing back against the void until it shrunk into nothing. She trusted Dread's word more then Emuh's so this confirmation was a load off her back.

She nodded, thoughtfully. "That's good. I think...I use magic enough that it will go by quickly. At least I hope so." She shuddered to think about her magic being like this for many many cycles afterwards. That would be...unfortunate. She'd rather get it over quickly, so she made a mental note to continue practicing as much as she could.

She looked up at Dread for a moment and tilted her head. "Wings? It takes practice to fly? I thought you could just...go. I never thought about it like that." Although she supposed it would be like walking. Didn't everyone have to learn to walk? Well, it hadn't taken her long to figure out, if she tried to think as far back as her memory could go. But maybe it was just harder to fly.

So caught up in thinking about it, she almost missed what Dread said next and the moment it registered, she felt her heart fall to her stomach. Already venom was seeping into her mind, poisonous memories threatening to infect what calm contentedness had taken over during the conversation. She gulped and tried to pass it off by flinging some more burning fungus around, but the magic escaped her, her focus slipped away in favor of the past.

She didn't look up at the dragon initially, trying to find a way to sum up her "experience" in a few simple words. After a few long moments of thought, she spoke, her voice a little quieter then usual. "They got me, a long time ago. They made me hurt my friends. I was only with them for maybe a day or two but that day ruined my life. Ruined everything for me. So...it's kind of because I don't want that happening to everyone else...and kind of for revenge. I can't help being angry at them for what they did to me." She wondered how long or how far she'd go until she was content, until she felt satisfied. Until Mother was destroyed? Until Order wiped from the caves? Or would it never be enough?

After a moment she shook herself out of it and looked back up. "What about you? Are you angry with them too?"

@Dread

"IT IS ABOUT THE MUSCLES," he tried to explain. "YOU CAN JUST GO. BUT IF YOU DON'T GO ENOUGH, IT'S HARDER. LIKE WHEN YOU WAKE UP FROM SLEEPING TOO LONG." He didn't explain this, instead aiming another blast of fire at the wall.

The brief sputter that emerged was not the flamethrower torrent of prior; it was more a spark and a flash, and then nothing. He huffed and shook himself, then glanced sidelong at Wilder, listening. "THEY GOT YOU?" He thought back, but didn't remember fighting her before, at least. "I REMEMBER THEY GOT A LOT." For once his voice quieted some, though it seemed to be less solemn so much as "everything is quieter and the dragon no longer feels the need to yell, at least for the next fifteen seconds." "I was paid to come and help fight it. I fight for shiny things. For gold. And there were many of us, and we went to the cave with the swamp, and we destroyed it." Abruptly, his volume increased as he switched to a different memory. So--ten seconds, maybe, at best. "BUT THEY CAME TO LEO AWHILE AGO AND TRIED TO TAKE IT OVER. SO DID THE THINGS OF CHAOS. SO WE FOUGHT THEM," he declared. "AND WE WON." So far as Dread was concerned, the victory that day had sat squarely on the shoulders of dragons. Order and Chaos both had departed, afterward; the dragons had not, and his territorial mind assumed that this meant victory.

He then looked around, shaking himself again and blinking. "I WANT TO BURN IT ALL," he added, but it was less vehement violence so much as simple explanation. He did, indeed, want to burn it all down. It just wasn't all that urgent; more like a daytime excursion.

@Wilder

She nodded along - the explanation made sense to her. Soreness in her muscles after crawling up of the chrysalis came to mind. Yeah it would take a lot of muscle strength to send the dragons aloft, wouldn’t it? Just like it took muscles in the legs to move a gembound forward. ”That makes sense. If you didn’t walk for a long time, you couldn’t just get up and run like you used to.”

She looked up in surprise at Dread, realizing how close they’d come to meeting, then. Perhaps how close they’d come to meeting on opposite sides. ”Oh, you were there? The Hive got me right before that. Everything that happened kind of led into it. I guess you could say it was the final stone that broke the wall. I used to be with the Bonebound but the Hive made me attack them. I wanted to fight when I woke up, but Astraea didn’t let me. He didn’t trust me.” She huffed, swatting at a stray climb of smoldering spores that drifted by her feet. ”I wouldn’t have either, but I would have liked to fight. To do something.”

Ears perked at the mention of Chaos. ”You mean, like…Vargas and his, uh, friends? I guess they got the message after Canis was attacked. Some of us tried to run after them but they stopped us here and, well…” She gestured vaguely to the smoldering fungus before them, a testament to their failure. Another bundle of still flaming fungus went flying at a push of Wilder’s will, lighting up the clump it fell onto.

She let a smile come back into her expression, catching the casual tone of Dreads voice. Like it was just another activity to stave off the monotonous boredom of life. It didn’t really matter to her why, to be honest, as long as the hive was destroyed, or at least held back. ”Me too,” she chirped her agreement. ”I mean look at this place. This cave was so pretty before. And they have claim over that strange rift, whatever it is. Leo could have been like this. Or Orin, or any of the other caves. I want to stop that, and stop what happened to me from happening to anyone else.”

@Dread

Dread nodded his massive head, seemingly pleased that Wilder was in agreement about the whole "burning the Hive" thing. Granted, they'd both already been working together for long minutes at that very task, but it was still satisfying to hear it.

Now, most of what Wilder said was too rapid for Dread, being as complex as it was. Names that he didn't recognize, for one thing--and even as he struggled to place them, she was pushing on to other things. He shook himself, at length, trying not to become frustrated. Instead he turned his fire on the walls again, huffing smoke before speaking. Ember eyes trailed over the sparks igniting and spreading rapid flames along the white-threaded walls, then shifted attention to Wilder. "YES, THEM. I SET THEM ON FIRE," he explained. Whether he meant in the recent battle, or in general, or even which "them" was wildly unclear. "I SEE WHY YOU WANT TO KILL THE HIVE THOUGH. I WOULD WANT TO KILL THEM TO. -I DO WANT TO, BUT NOT BECAUSE THEY HAD ME," he added, matter-of-factly.

...He hoped that was all clear.

Anyway; small talk time. He wasn't very good at it but by Astraea (and--ahh, he remembered who that deer was, now! that asshole! The one who'd threatened to take their children, and the one who'd blown up all those Lessers, and-...) -anyway, he'd try. "WHAT WILL YOU DO AFTER IT IS ALL GONE?"

@Wilder

The words Dread responded with sent a strong shiver down her body. She tried to cover it with a flick of her paw to send more flaming fungus tumbling into more patches, but all she ended up doing was walking herself in the face from a flick too hard. ”I don’t know about kill, exactly. I’d rather…stop the Hive. Maybe some of them can be saved, you know? Like I was.” She thought, then, about Mother itself and the strange creatures that she had seen here. The ones that had seemed so unlike any other Gembound, almost insectoid in nature.

She gulped. ”Although…I guess in the end if they too far gone, then yes - kill them. And Mother.” Despite her eagerness to burn the fungus and stop the Hive, the thought of actually ending a life…that was truly terrifying.

She was beginning to grow tired from the constant magic use and the smoke was beginning to get to her. Her nose was burning and she coughed lightly. ”After they’re gone…I think I’d just like some peace for a while. And then I’ll go back to learning. There’s lots to discover in these caves. Lots of mysteries.”

She looked towards where she knew the waterfall would be, although she couldn’t see it through the blankets of white and the clouds of smoke. ”Once this room is cleansed, I might investigate the rift here to start. Or maybe learn to read.”

@Dread