[Flashback] Oh the Weather outside is frightful

[Wrenmae]

Winter 45, 509 AV

Bonewhite, Blindfall, frost curled on the cusp of breath and traced a finger along lips bright with fire. Slanting eyes, the sky too rich with wind and frost to gaze upon Zulrav openly. One hand curled along a tough length of leather, pulling a tired horse up steep divides and scattered stones toward the yawning maw of stillness just beyond the storm. Wrenmae was covered in fur, Djed sparking along his skin and face and spinning locks of thick hair to sprout from his skin and rage across his face like leaf-less trees. He strained, stressing his muscles to drag his horse toward the cave he’d spotted before the skies had bled their frozen tears. He wasn’t strong, a slight man with a narrow chest and narrow shoulders. Still, he pulled the beast with him. To stay in the heart of the blizzard would be to invite death. Easier to hunker in a cave and carefully burn the scattered wood he’d gathered on the way up. In the morning he could return to Alvadas, cursing aching bones and frozen blood.

It had been curiosity which brought him out here, the rumor of a flower that bloomed only once before a snowstorm, lost in the white that followed. In retrospect, it had been a wild tale, even measured against the stories Wrenmae had been told before. Now he was the fool, caught in Kalea’s wrath as Zulrav howled wild abandon across the sky. Pushing his horse, Weaver, Wrenmae entered the tiny abyss cut into the mountain, leaving the worst of the storm behind.

He could feel the cold, a gnawing certainty along his bones but the fur he’d conjured up kept the fatal edge of it away. Wrenmae chuckled suddenly, imagining how frightening he might look to an outsider. A hairy beast hiding in a cave, a monster seeking fire and the comforts of civilization.

Wrenmae gathered the wood from Weaver’s back and set to work. Stripping the wood with one of his daggers, gathering piles of loose tinder and larger branches, Wrenmae constructed the skeleton of a blaze that would hopefully last the evening. Flint, tinder, tools of nature and man spitting shattered sunlight into the cave, catching the curled edges of the tinder and gnawing farther, growing like a child.

Sitting back, kicking at the jagged ends of wood deeper into flame’s embrace, Wrenmae sighed. He had not banished his fur yet, comforted in the extra cushion it provided him. Weaver snorted, sneezing with miserable displeasure. Wrenmae patted the horse, comforted that the creature would survive the night with him. It wasn’t his horse, borrowed from his adopted father. It wouldn’t do to leave a corpse out here, especially such an undeserving steed. The fire faltered suddenly, cold winds entering the cave and scuttling around the blaze. Wrenmae closed his eyes, tired and afraid. The darkness could easily claim him here, a stupid decision prompting his possible demise out here.

It wasn’t in his hands any longer and higher powers held his fate.

Given what he’d been through, it wasn’t a thought that inspired much confidence.

[Wrenmae]

Time passes slowly in the night. Without a means of measuring chronological passage, with the snow bombarding the entrance of the cave, Wrenmae had only himself and the horse to keep him company. The inside of the cave was cold, a muted tomb for the unwary and trapped. Pushing himself closer to the fire he'd fashioned, Wrenmae rubbed his furry hands together and tried to absorb as much warmth as he could. Outside the wind howled, a never ending and dirgeing moan. Here, now, trapped beneath stone and companion to only a horse, the boy sincerely regretted his trip out in the darkness of Kalea. As time passed, in the drips and drops that time often passes by unobserved, the fire lit the cave in patches of sporadic glares. Here and there shapes rose, monstrous shadows that died into nothing. Curious, certainly still cold, the mage searched the small abscess between stone for any clue as to what the cave had been used for before, what it was. He found little here, only the emptieness of stone and the hollow moan of wind in a desolate place...or at least that's what he assumed. Toward the back of the cave, a cairn of piled stones drew his attention. The firelight barely reached them, dancing against the oddly specific placement. It was tantalizing, drawing. With hesitant hands, Wrenmae began to pull the stones apart, placing them with dull clanks and cracks on the cave floor till most of the top layer had been removed. A black gleam showed through the rocks, silver veins pulsing across what appeared to be volcanic stone. Pushing more from the pile, the stone thing grew larger, more uncovered, and finally with the last push of a weighty rock, it curled into a hand and five fingers. Falling backward, a gasp caught in his throat, Wrenmae stared at the hand, his heart hammering within him, wild and unrestrained. Alone in the Kalea ranges, days from Alvadas...he had discovered a body. A body buried and forgotten beneath the stones.

[Wrenmae]

Hold his breath, Wrenmae approached the stone arm again, noting where it connected to slightly glimmering, thick skin. Pushing the remainder of the stone off the body, the muscled form of an Isur was revealed to him. The smell was minimal, the body must have been preserved by the cold somewhat and as he looked on it, the serene face looked back, eyes closed and chin forthright and strong, jutting from the body as it lay undisturbed among the stones and dust. Wrenmae touched it gingerly, feeling the thick ever-present callous of their tough skin, the way it resembled armor almost...strong, unyielding, threaded with veins of silver. Emitting Res from his palms, Wrenmae gathered the magic and turned it into wind, blowing the dust and debris from the body one small wind blast at a time, careful not to disturb the corpse too much, his reimancy washing over the body like a grim blanket. Exposed like this, only a tunic, pants, and shoes to it, it seemed so bare, so inanimate. Wrenmae had seen an Isur only a few times before. Most of it had been in Alvadas, catching sight of them through the crowd...short but proud people with their strange left or right arm. They were craftsman, stout warriors, and not to be trifled with. At least, that's what he'd been told. Now it seemed strange to be so close. He looked as though he was asleep, as if the Isur put their head to rock and covered themselves in it to sleep. Of course, the chest did not move, and blood congealed around an old wound in his chest. No, this one had been dead for a bit, perhaps a month. Rot had started to shape his skull out of his face, but the thick Isur skin took longer to decay than most...or at least it seemed that way. It was certainly thicker and more resolute than Wrenmae's. Maybe...warmer. Pausing, Wrenmae scurried back to the fire and brought a fashioned torch to the body, fixing it above it and stripping off his clothing. Alone here, he had nothing to worry about modesty, or the macabre theft he was prepared to make. Feeling the way the muscles connected to each other, the latticed vein work over the skin, the glossy black hair slightly coiffed from the skull...Wrenmae set these details in his mind and brought the Djed up through himself. Morphing was about acquiring shapes, not just mixing and matching from the body. An Isur shape may be invaluable sometime in the future and...besides, Wrenmae wanted a measure of that thicker skin, bones, defenses.

[Wrenmae]

Concentrating, he focused first on his own skin. Not just thickening it, but hardening it, forcing the Djed through his body to mimic the Isur. One hand on the skin, he brought its hardness, its likeness against himself, silvered lines following his veins through his skin and up his body. He felt thicker, heavier, even a bit stronger at first...but like he was wearing some sort of close fitting armor rather than his own skin. Tracing the ling across his shoulders and against his chest, the bones of the Isur were another difficulty in morphing. Wrenmae had long ago grasped the concepts behind competent morphing, but bones always gave him trouble. Focusing on his own, he felt them twist and shift within his body, an uncomfortable widening and densifying of the matter beneath his already denser skin. Falling back a bit, gasping as he felt the magics inside him, Wrenmae changed his hair with little more than a thought...a bloom of black taking his brown by sudden surprise, leaving it night. Weaver snorted, but Wrenmae was already shaping his chin and face into the Isur code of rigid lines and strong jutting strength. He had no mirror to compare himself, but used his hands to tell him the shape of the bones in relation to his own. He shrank, smaller in order to compensate for the matter needed to be put into his skin and bones...but it wasn't hard to keep the disguise, given that the Isur were short people to begin with. Confident in his shape, Wrenmae slammed a hand against a stone, feeling the impact, but less the pain of pressure. He had mimicked the defensive unyielding strength of the Isur skin perfectly. All that remained was the black left arm. Hand against it, Wrenmae had no idea what he could possibly do to begin copying it. It felt like nothing natural he'd ever experienced before...more akin to the rough stone than flesh at all. Like...a beetle carapace? He began there, bringing the harness of a beetle into his arm, coloring it black, shaping the ambient Djed throughout his body. It yielded nothing that did not need to be moved with joints, like armor. No...this was not something he was able to morph like a beetle, he needed to understand how it moved, how it worked. Pushing the fingers, clacking them against the cave floor, spreading the hand, clenching it, pulling the fingers and bending the arm with strained effort after effort taught him it was like a metallic bone, a moving seamless shield. It took hours to get the shape and texture right, his arm a morphing shifting swarm of tiny Djed skin tags that fell into each other and then released, all that effort into mimicking a left arm. Finally satisfied, Wrenmae let the form revert, his body twisting and pulling as he fell back into himself, gasping narrow chest and panting, cold body. Djed left him colder, tired, and he crawled back to the fire, eager to take part in its warmth. He had exhausted himself for the evening, as the snow whirled outside and continued its growing onslaught. For now, he was content...or as content as he could be. Alone in the cave with a corpse and a horse. He almost smiled. How ridiculous.

[Wrenmae]

While he let his Djed reset itself, taking sparing bites of his rations and absently patting Weaver on the neck, Wrenmae lost himself in the fire, concerned only for the leaping fray of flames and how they licked across his face. The light fed him, deprived him, held him in the same callous disregard he assumed all fire would. In one moment he was fully realized, alive in the glow, and in the next he was nothing but shadow and skin. Outside the storm had grown worse, snow falling in slants across the entrance of the cave. Not so deep to worry, but enough to draw his eyes every now and then to the outside. Weaver nickered, nervous, and Wrenmae turned to the horse, brushing his mane and whispering words of comfort against his skin. A faint trickle of Djed pushed into the horse's frightened mind, layering calming feelings of peace and ease, despite the claustrophobic environment. Wrenmae combated the natural instinct of the horse's own panic with reinforced suggestion, simple tricks by a hypnotist, but hard in the need to root them within the horse's psychology. Emotions were easy to convey, but they were fickle and rarely stuck. Understanding emotional evolution was, in part, understanding how animals thought. In this case, Weaver, the horse, existed as a philter to practice his magic upon. To go against the natural instinct of the animal to be out and walking in the open air, that was a task Wren had set himself up to accomplish. The fire burned low, and emitting a trickle of Djed from his hand, Wrenmae coaxed the fire back to life with brief puffs of wind, waking the embers and scattering the flames. Weaver was quiet, a steady mantra of hypnotic suggestion keeping the horse from being restless, from shaking itself loose of the cave and quitting Wren's presence. It was a process that exhausted the mage, took him to the wee hours of the dawn, when light first filtered through the makeshift grave and warned Wren of his chance to leave. The storm had died, the path back to Alvadas dusted with snow and ice. It would be treacherous going, but he was determined to make it. The Unforgiving had claimed his family. It still hungered for him...but it would not have him. Not yet.

[Phoenix]

Wrenmae

Experience

Skill	XP Earned
Wilderness Survival	3
Cooking	2
Morphing	5
Observation	5
Reimancy	3
Hypnotism	3

Lores

• Cats eyes
• Dedication- to follow a myth even at ones potential peril
• Finding an unknown corpse
• Aiming to be more like the Isur- literally
• Model- Isur (morphing)

The Order of the Phoenix

Well, I do have to say that I wasn't expecting that. Interesting thread! I enjoyed it a lot, even though it gave me the shivers. Dead bodies are gross.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding the XP or Lore, send me a PM and we will work things out.