NOVEL FROG (Vol 5) Chapter 39: The Hunt
Arthen Wybayer, Deputy Marshal of The Hunt, dismounted from his warg Winterseed some distance from the three whimpering ghost hounds most called Witchkillers. It was a logical alteration within the Dominion, as they did not care to be thought of as using spirits, at least not to the common public.
The twice-doomed canines, shrunk and half faded to nothing already, rose from sitting in the torn-up weeds and dirt. They turned their heads to him, obviously recognizing him. Their tails wagged slightly.
They dare to hope for a solution from me.
Arthen approached, leaving Winterseed to sit on her rear and watch with general placid distaste. She was not very approving of any other animal, much less dead ones. She was waiting for them to be dealt with, probably.
The dirt showed signs of struggle nearby. Combat, certainly, and foes leaving in a hurry. That was good — they’d leave a lot of information behind in their haste. In fact, Arthen even saw what looked like soaked blood in the dirt.
How nice of them to leave a favor.
Arthen first petted the dogs because they were good boys. They whimpered and licked his hand and perhaps even enjoyed his company. That was one thing Arthen and no one else could ever be sure of — how ‘real’ the ghost hounds were. Whether they felt or thought or lived in any true capacity. No one could say for certain. Many believed them merely mimics — programmed phantoms.
Falling to one knee, Arthen did two soft snaps of his fingers to draw their attention. Three ghostly red canine figures, still giant and looking down at him, arrayed themselves very orderly in front of him.
“Begone from this world,” Arthen commanded softly, “as your master is not recoverable and there is no more for you to do here. So commands Arthen Wybayer. Farewell.”
With final mournful howls, the ghost dogs faded to nothing, their howls fading with them.
Arthen began inspecting the area of the scuffle. There were signs of the great beasts jumping into the air from their liftoffs and their heavy landings. High Jumps. Trying to reach flyers? When he sifted through the torn-up earth, he found a bloody piece of scale. Immediately, he took the tiniest bit to taste the blood, utilizing his identification abilities.
A dragon, and linked to fae. This is from spirit flesh.
He felt no special hatred — he was more intrigued that something like that would be so far north. Technically, if he discounted the fact that the Inquisition was in a tizzy about the fugitive they were hunting, his primary concern was ensuring they were gone and not making a habit of being invaders, raiders, or whatever other absurdity brought them there. Containment and prevention.
But everything had the scent of being linked. There was a source to sniff out, a mystery in the southern reaches that was increasingly worrying him with every bit of news he got.
Winterseed had been inspecting the site extensively as well, primarily by the powers of her huge, sensitive snout. Within his mind, her whispery, scraggly voice said, “A human among them, fainter as no blood was spilled. The stink of magic. Wiseman-flavored.” Momentarily, Winterseed sent a packet of senses for Arthen to peruse.
He closed his eyes and channeled it, to ‘smell’ what Winterseed did as a warg. He was perhaps among the most gifted at interpreting it correctly thanks to his lifetime devotion to enhancing those senses as well as utilizing blood magic.
Suddenly, he laughed as he processed the information. “Haha — pff! One of their own? Priceless. No wonder they were so vague. How are they this incompetent? You’d think this a story from the Southlands.”
Winterseed seemed a bit annoyed. “You’re not going to report this to them, are you? As would have to be construed is your duty.”
“It’s never good to be known as knowing something damaging to them, not if it's going to persist as a thorn in their side. That is the opposite of a rewarding venture. I’d be an idiot to report unless I had them — or at least a strong lead. Does this smell like a strong lead to you?”
“No. The trail is like a strange, fat vulture or a mutant griffon. It is simply here, leading into nothing but the sky.”
“Exactly. They took to the air, and somehow while remaining clandestine.” Arthen stowed the scale away in a dimensional satchel specialized in preservation. “They’re long gone, and if you can easily cross this forest, you have many different routes to take. Also, that scent is a dragon, Winterseed.”
The warg’s massive head spun around to him, her cackles raising in a visible bush-out of fur. “Really?! Now I desire to hunt it and taste its fresh blood!”
“I’m sure you do.” Arthen stood and walked over to the spot that looked like a drawn-out wrestling match between a giant and a ghost dog and began hunting down a blood source in the dirt. “Perhaps you will, if they have returned to the world.”
He found a somewhat moist dirt clump with blood mixed in and tasted it. Nothing terribly distinct, just like a giant human perhaps. More fae. A giant and a dragon? And a faint scent of birds. Quite a lot of variance. Strong possibility of shapeshifting, especially if tied to those druids.
Winterseed was still excited about the dragon. “But what about this dragon? Didn’t these culprits murder your father — disintegrate him? What about revenge?”
Arthen stood once more and cast his eyes over to the spot the ghost hounds had been practically glued to. He was never physically here if there isn't a single drop of physical scent lingering. Very odd. “I’d rather him dead like this than alive. He’ll be remembered better that way, after his… increasingly disturbing habits. Now I can mitigate his reputation post-mortem. The Marshal will be more than facilitating to such propaganda.”
Stowing the little clump in the preservation satchel, Arthen continued, “This is a Long Hunt, Winterseed. We’ve only been given a taste of a larger problem sweeping the lands. What hand the Hunters play, it needs to be considered only when our own hand is full and every resource of advantage exhausted. I left the bluff and bluster to die with my early career.”
Along with your buried predecessor, pup. I’d prefer another not be sacrificed for my mistakes. He took a piece of me with him, damn it. Besides, I have a legacy of success to leave already.
The warg settled down and sniffed. “You and your strange metaphors. I hope part of this knowledge is where to find dragons to sink my teeth into.”
Ignoring this, Arthen took a last look over the evidence in the dirt. The taste was ultimately of Something New amid very, very old, covered ground. He didn’t like it, nor did he like mysteries. He’d been uncovering them his whole life. Ignoring this one wasn’t feasible. But the pompous, overbearing methodology of the Inquisition, always more fit for lands they dominated, was clearly not going to work in the places where chaos reigned and grew.
Just a bunch of old cripples staring into the ether at each other’s gaseous emissions. No. No more leaving it to their chippy altercations and interference. No more leaving it to implied fears and intimidation. They’ve failed.
It’s time the Hunt awoke.
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Annoyingly, the custom spell creation of the Protection spell still didn’t complete the quest Sammy had, as she still had to use it in a ‘situation of relevance.’
I wonder if training counts? Maybe if I literally have someone shoot me. Ugh, what have I got myself into?
Getting shot was the last thing she wanted to do. She could cast it on someone else and have them get shot. That seemed only appealing for Servitors, for whom quite possibly it would not be considered ‘relevant’ enough.
She got no ‘emergency calls’ during the whole spell development session. When she checked on the riverboat with Ash, it was already heading upriver to Mot Mekess, everything with the plan having gone off without a hitch. Meanwhile, Dart was flying high and south, eventually slated for somewhere in Redberry’s territory and likely destruction as if the melted mirror was the One Ring.
We could dissolve it in magical acid. I could have Dart turn into the appropriate dragon to do that, technically.
Her remaining time until Ash hit Mot Mekess was spent in a massive amount of brainstorming on a plethora of spells that might or might not see the light of day, namely because this was stupidly fast for the first half of a spell. The way Magical Invention worked, most time was spent already at over fifty percent complete, and the remaining time was roughly equal to full spell development… if one did nothing but book learning.
But if that time was spent utilizing practical learning by example and so forth, one could jump to seventy or eighty percent very quickly, and then finishing off with books, blunt-force design, and cold, hard research was much easier.
As such, experimenting with tons of different ideas, going from one to the next, and leaving a shitload of stuff half-complete, was actually a big benefit, though seemingly counter-intuitive. It was hard to ‘bank’ inspiration, as it usually just channeled into whatever you next worked on. Getting spell designs to the halfway point and going from there ‘later’ was more efficient.
She also found that thanks to everything being custom spells for her, she could bake in a lot of fluidity to her designs, and the raw time spent swallowed in spell research and development became an amorphous, changeable mass of intentions, mechanics, and concepts. Fragments of spells were not simply ‘fifty percent of rules written out.’
In her ongoing, developing theorem of magic, spellcraft was micro-concentrated, manufactured ley lines (or threads) and nexus points of specialized, contoured mana. Through the concentration of that energy, they were able to ‘bend’ themselves to the angle of the spirit world and connect, interlace, and synthesize with pneuma, in combination becoming a physical or physio-magical effect.
Spells were novel networks or collections contoured a particular way, and the fragments of spells were individual points or threads. They were not all the same, and each had some specificity, much like rune-forms from the default system of magic. But that could simply be altered as one hammered out the details of a spell later. She had conspired much more flexibility there, and could even punt the timing of the Spellbreak.
Because there was still specificity, she needed a preponderance of half-completions. She estimated she’d need about 50-100 half-completed spells to cover nearly any actual design. Perhaps she would figure out a closer number with time, but in any case, she conjured up twenty to start.
One of them would be a level six that was probably her next target due to The Spellslinger’s Weaves quest. She was going for some sort of Abjuration-based damage aura, after being inspired that her specialty school could be jiggered to do damage from her recent reading of Mystical Trap.
Her brain was pretty much burned out on it as the deepening wee hours saw the arrival of her carriage in Geirkos. Time had flown, but she was still earlier than the riverboat would arrive in Mot Mekess. She had something she wanted to cram into the time available, but first things first, she needed to go see Tashome.
From the hideout central, she walked to the other building and up to his room in the gloom. She already knew he was awake, having slept some earlier… but the nightmares remained merciless.
He grunted at her knock and she entered to find him drinking from a flask and pouring through some tome or another, sitting at a new, nice-looking hardwood desk.
Sammy strolled up and dropped an arrow with a heart-shaped head on top of the book. “You said you craft from items of significance? Here’s your shot. Make this damn thing mean something. Please.”
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Nice.