Broken Lands

Leo wanted to rush through breakfast at Arvinn’s. Unfortunately, her parents were in no hurry. Worse, Reko wasn’t even there yet. His suggestion that they eat quickly and then collect Reko on the way was dismissed with an “enjoy your food young man; you’ll be eating on the run enough while you’re in the World Tree.”

Leo made himself sit and eat politely while Arvinn’s parents quizzed her on monsters she might see in the roots of the World Tree, even though they were unlikely to see most of them. It felt like a particularly awkward family gathering and it wasn’t even his family!

The air shifted as a flying fish rocketed in through an open window. Reko flared his wings just in time to avoid slamming into the wall.

“Reko! What have I told you about indoor flying?” Arvinn’s mother scolded.

“Sorry,” Reko answered with a tone Leo knew well. He wasn’t sorry at all; he probably didn’t even really care about getting in trouble. “You didn’t listen, did you?”

“Listen to what?” Arvinn demanded over her mother’s irritation.

“Leo, your sister was headed to the third branch, right?” Reko fluttered his wings and drifted towards Leo.

Leo shook his head. “Fourth level, I think. She said it was third upgrade, so ground plus three.”

“That’s the third branch,” Reko said as if it was obvious that they counted floors like Europeans instead of Americans.

Okay, maybe it made sense when you were talking about a tree. That didn’t make it any less confusing.

Leo conceded the floor number with a shrug. “Okay, third branch. So?”

“So there’s an Event on the third branch! Your sister is so lucky! I want to do an Event!” Reko rose and fell in the air.

“You’ll get to do one eventually,” Arvinn’s father said with a grin. “Just pay attention to the Lifeweb the way you did this morning and you’ll hear when one opens in the roots. There won’t be a major Event in the roots until the one on the third branch is over, so now’s a good time to head in. Once Leo and Arvinn are done eating, that is.”

Leo scooped up the last bit of jelly with the last of his small dough circles and stood quickly. “I’m ready now.”

He popped the jelly-coated mini biscuit into his mouth. It was yummy, but even better than that, it was something he’d never had before today. He was very tired of breakfast, but the problem definitely wasn’t the food; it was the fact that he wasn’t getting to explore the World Tree.

“Me too!” Unlike Leo, Arvinn didn’t bother to finish the last couple of bites of her breakfast.

“After you finish,” Arvinn’s mother told her with a grin.

“But Mom-”

“It will be faster to eat than to argue.”

Arvinn sighed loudly.

Leo reached over and snagged Arvinn’s untouched manadeer sausage. It was spiced differently than any sausage he’d had back home, so even though the meat wasn’t that different from any other slightly magical deer, it was still interesting. Whoever prepared it had used a lot of cinnamon, or something close enough that it might as well be cinnamon, so it left an interesting burn after each bite.

“Hey!” Arvinn set her hands on her hips and glared at Leo. “That’s mine!”

“You don’t want it back,” Leo observed. No one ever wanted already-eaten food back, after all. “And you said you were done anyway.”

“He has a point,” Arvinn’s mother said, obviously “helping.” “Can’t complain about someone else eating your breakfast if you don’t want it.”

“Reko never steals my food!” Arvinn protested.

“I can’t eat your food,” Reko observed dryly. “Of course I don’t steal it.”

“Fiiiine,” Arvinn whined before she grabbed the mini biscuits that were left on her plate and stuffed them all in her mouth at once.

This trip into the World Tree was going to be tons of fun. Leo could tell.

--------------

Sophia finished telling Leo what little she knew about the Meteor Pillars event and grinned. As they expected, he was having a great time on the lowest level of the World Tree, even if he hadn’t expected that his best use so far was scaring butterflies. Admittedly, the butterflies were large, big enough that Leo was the only one of the three that was taller than they were, and that was in his human shape, but it was still a surprise.

Sophia was pretty happy about it. Not only did he seem cheerful, if a little chagrined about what their first real enemy was, but it was a far better use for him than acting as the group’s shield the way he had on their first excursion into the World Tree’s roots. Having to deal with a puzzle zone where you had to shoo butterflies around was a good change of pace.

Rather like the change of pace Sophia was waiting on, in fact. It was going to come significantly sooner than she’d originally expected, if a little later than their excited goose wanted. The 24-hour timer to choose teams wasn’t real.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. It could last for 24 hours. It just almost never did, because it would end early when the Guide - or maybe the World Tree - announced that everyone had either chosen a team or forfeited. After that, they’d have fifteen minutes to make final preparations before the first Meteor Fall started.

Sophia took two steps towards Dav before she was interrupted by the announcement they’d all been waiting on. There was no new information beyond the fact that there were 4011 Participants and 314 Pillars.

“Figures.” Notii, the winged badger, grumbled. “That’s more than twelve … almost thirteen per team. Five reward rounds, probably. Could be four. Not nearly as good as it should be.”

Sophia already knew why he was unhappy. More than the recommended number of people on most teams meant they felt they were weaker than the area required, which usually meant fewer Reward Rounds and lower rewards at the end. She could understand the concern, but she didn’t share it. She didn’t really care about the rewards; she was ready to reach the fifth level of the Moonlit Branches … fine, the fourth branch … and convince Archon of Stone Issvako to open a Way to Dav’s homeworld. Maybe she’d succeed or maybe she’d have to take a harder path; either way, she was tired of the waiting.

“Don’t care! We get to kill monsters!” Tellix bounced up and down, flapping his white wings excitedly.

Sophia nodded at her teammate, then paused. All of her teammates from the Flying Stars had feathers pinned to their armor and bound to their weapons. The other teams she was working with didn’t. Most of them didn’t need the feathers for their armor; anyone with feathered wings had plenty of feathers. Sophia thought that would extend to their weapons, too, though she hadn’t actually tested that. It felt like it would; if it didn’t, she could always give them feathers later.

Three of the archons didn’t have feathered wings. None of them had wings that were quite as odd as Shaman Venique Et’Zin’s wings, but neither skin-covered wings like a bat’s or gauzy wings like a dragonfly’s had feathers, and one of the archons had birdlike wings made of wind rather than physical wings at all. They would need the feathers.

The starling landed in front of Sophia while she told Notii that she could enhance the attacks and defenses of those within her Domain who bore feathers. It wasn’t a hard sell; as soon as she said that she carried feathers others could affix to their armor or weapons to extend her protection to them, Notii asked her for enough feathers for everyone, even the people with actual feathered wings.

Well, everyone except the starling. He rejected the feathers with the single word, “Awkward.”

Once Notii hurried off with the feather tokens, the starling hopped into the air and flew up towards Sophia’s face. Like the other archons Sophia had seen, he had to have some flight-based magic; while starlings could fly, and fly well, she was pretty sure they didn’t normally hover the way he did. “Your enchantment. Sublime.”

“Thanks?” Sophia wasn’t sure what to say about it. “It’s just a ward spell with a few minor tweaks. They’re pretty standard variations.”

“No,” the starling rejected her claim, even though it was the truth. “I study enchantment, will be my Profession. Explain? Please?”

When she first met the starling, Sophia thought it was short on words because it didn’t like to talk. She was beginning to think that was wrong and that it didn’t say much because speaking was hard. “Sure, why not? I can go over the basic structure while we wait for the event to begin.”

There was barely time to explain the outer containment loop, as it turned out. The starling acted like it was something unusual when it was a standard piece of almost every ward Sophia cast, designed to veil the inner workings of the ward from ordinary MageSight. It didn’t stop MageSight; it simply made it fuzzier so that it took longer to work your way through. It was a simple, cheap part of any ward that also had someone watch it to make sure no one lingered to take it apart, that was all.

It wasn’t a part of any of the wards she’d seen in the Broken Lands, but they were all terrible at making wards. Enchanters on Arcatiz were better, but if the starling’s questions said anything, an outer containment loop was not part of their standard ward arrangement.

Sophia was just starting on the wardstone placement when a hissing noise followed by a sudden impact in the distance announced the moment they’d all been waiting for: the first meteors were falling. It wasn’t long before they began falling near their pillar, lighting up the sky with trails of fire that looked more like something you’d see on a movie poster than in reality.

Oh, some of them were decent, with both a bow and a trail of superheated air, but many of them looked more like a rock with a rocket flame coming out of its rear than something coming from space. Sophia guessed that actually made some sense here; these weren’t real meteors, after all. Most meteors didn’t make it to the ground.

More importantly, real meteors weren’t monsters.These definitely were; when the first one landed, legs unfolded and the now no longer burning “meteor” stood up on six oddly-jointed legs and looked around the barren, rocky plain. They looked like a turtle crossed with a particularly ugly beetle with a spiky rock shell.

The second one was like the first, but the third extended legs from inside itself instead of unfolding. Even after it was finally on the ground, fire continued to stream out behind it, always pointed towards the brightly-lit swirl in the sky that substituted for a proper star.

Whatever these things were, there were at least two types of them.

The World Tree didn’t tell Sophia anything other than that they were Rockshell Crawlers and Fallen Insectites. She couldn’t tell if there was anything else, but everything close to them looked like one of those two creatures. For now, they were easy enough to make out, with the insectites’ flaming banners making them clear even when they were surrounded by the larger Rockshell Crawlers.