Chapter 1123: Future Course
The Stormborn Oak.
The name of Leon’s next destination enticed him greatly, even if he had yet to perceive it in any way. He wished he’d picked Jamshid’s brain about it more before he’d left Shatufan, but he was already pressed for time as it was. The forest in which the Stormborn Oak could be found was several days away at the fastest pace his group could make, which after his time in Shatufan, meant he would’ve burned through seven of the thirty days of safety Nestor guaranteed for the Artor Valley.
The Redspark Forest was his destination. The trees of this forest, he could see with his magic senses, appeared quite similar to the immense trees of his new home, with reddish bark and immense size, though the leaves of those trees were cloudy white rather than dark blue. He couldn’t say for certain how much of the forest was made up of these similar trees, however, for much of the forest’s interior was shrouded in a dense storm, within which bright flashes of red lightning could be seen.
It seemed the storm there was an eternally raging thing, which itself didn’t appear that uncommon in the Storm Lands—the place, whether due to the number of strong lightning mages or not, was steeped in lightning magic, and as a result, the weather wasn’t that hard to enrage. The storm Leon called around the Artor Valley, for instance, was still going even though he was no longer there.
This storm in the interior of the Redspark Forest, however, didn’t seem to be natural, or whatever passed for natural in the Storm Lands. Rather, there was a crescent of high hills on the northern side of the forest that reached down the eastern and western sides and seemed to hold in the power of the forest. The trees, Leon guessed, perhaps generated lightning magic in some way, and the geography of the area kept much of that magic trapped, which then led to the storm.
Such was merely guesswork on his part, however, for his party was only two days into their four-day-long journey to the largest town he could see on the forest’s outskirts. To give his weaker followers some time to rest, he’d taken to landing for a few hours at night, which was fortunately all that was needed.
During the rest period of the second day of this journey, he found himself sitting on a boulder on the hill his people encamped upon. They were far into the Shaded Plain, with Treasure Lake to their south, and Krizos, the largest city in the area, on its shore. The Bolt Mountains lay further east, and just beyond them to the northeast lay Redspark Forest.
The Shaded Plain lived up to its name, with ghostly gray grass that reminded him rather unpleasantly of Arkhnavi. That plane, however, had the excuse of having been poisoned by the foul magic of a Primal Devil. This plain, bereft of any plant life save for this eerie gray grass, was another kind of disquieting. The wind hardly blew over it, too, and though the Origin Spark burned just as brightly above it as everywhere else in the Nexus, the plain was cold and lifeless. Leon couldn’t even sense any animal or insect life.
A large lake lay to the north, with cold, unnaturally still waters. Fog drifted across the mirror-like surface, and when Leon turned his magic senses upon it, he couldn’t but feel like it was turning its attention back upon him. The Lake of the Lost, it was called, and while Leon was desperate for the power to save his new city, whatever power lay in that lake was not one he wanted to so much as cough at, let alone attempt to seize for himself.