[Flashback] On the Banks of the Suvan (solo)

[Wrenmae]

On the banks of the Suvan, where tendrils of cut land spread toward Alvadas in slowly tapering fissures, Wrenmae kicked his foot out over the water. It was a sunny day, the bright lancing rays cutting across the sea like lances. Each rose and fell with the swell of Laviku’s heartbeat, washing and breaking over Wrenmae’s bare feet with gentle coercion. Zan was out beside him, ducking and bobbing in the surf, the only water that did not move by command.

“This stuff is unambitious,” Zan muttered, ducking in and out of the oncoming waves, “I sense it wants to swallow the land, but with such weak punches, it’ll take forever!”

“Maybe that’s the point,” Wrenmae said, staring at the small silver fish beneath the surface, “Do it all at once and we’ll notice. Maybe bit by bit means humans don’t suspect a thing.”

“You guys ARE awfully unintelligent,” Zan commented dryly, “So I don‘t know why the ocean doesn’t get a grip and just rise up. C’mon. C’MON.”

“I can’t breathe underwater.”

“So?”

“You’d die.”

“I mean…well, ok. Sure. Maybe after you’re gone, after we set out for the wider, bigger world. Then when we come back, we take a dip in the pool where Alvadas used to be.”

“I’d hope not.”

“Why?”

Wrenmae drew some hair from his face and leaned back on his arms. The sun crossed his pale skin and kissed it there, leaving red residue spreading along his arms and face. “Too many good memories in the city of Illusion. I’d hate to see it go.”

“But most of them fear you.”

“They fear my mark, Vayt’s mark,” Wrenmae responded flippantly, “Me? I think without this mark, I could be loved, even lauded.”

“Oh the deep depths of delusion, Poor master, so given to the passions of fantasy! Woe is I, Woe the poor Sarawanki.”

Wrenmae aimed a kick at the familiar, but it scuttled out of his reach. He chuckled, and the familiar joined in. It was a good day, a perfect one to bond.

[Wrenmae]

Wren had left the city with his tools in search of bones. Malediction was a dangerous craft, surely, but he felt that the stronger he became in its application, the more sure he could be that his practice wouldn’t backfire on him. Sailors talked about this cove with soft reverence. Bone Cove, they called it, the place where the remains of sea monsters and men came to rest. Laviku’s basin, really, and a lesser known location for those looking to make a business in scrimshaw or decorations involving the corpses of the left behind.

Kicking his feet out over the water, he could already see the pale glimmer of bones sticking from the silt. Some of them were obviously fish, the defined shape and gaping eyeless skulls. Others were stranger still, longer like a snake, or snapped as if crushed in the maw of some unimaginable leviathan. Whistling to himself, Wrenmae pulled Djed into his eyes, activating his aura sight as he looked through the waves. At his skill level, the effort required incredible concentration. He sifted through the surface of the water, strands of magic clouding his eyes. He sought the unbroken bones, complete skeletons with at least a hint to what had happened. Old age, maybe, sometimes preyed upon. It was important to know the origin of the bones in question if one was to ascertain how the object would work when created.

After a few moments of scanning the surface, a dull headache starting to form, Wrenmae spotted a few bones and dived off the edge, swimming down through the clear ocean water to retrieve them. He pulled several from the muck, explosions of sand and startled fish in the wake of his disturbance.

Zan swam by him, the presence of warmth on his upper shoulder. Wren smiled beneath the waves, tossing the bones up onto the rocky bank and scrabbling out of the water.

“Look out, boyo,” Zan warned in his head, “We have an inquisitive visitor.”

Turning to the water, a black fin cut through the waves. A shark had come into the bay, seeking the smell of the dead and decaying. It was a massive creature, nearly twenty five feet long with skin the blue of deep water and a belly white as snow. It followed the course of Wrenmae’s dive, seeking his smell. Had it not been so awesome, so terrifyingly huge, Wrenmae would have been fully overwhelmed by wonder. Instead, this portrait of powerful hunger only filled his stomach with a cold uncomfortable introspection.

Lazily it drifted through the cove, seeking food in the darker crevices. Transfixed, Wrenmae only set the bones on his lap and followed the lazy shape of the creature. It was so…beautiful, terrible and yet a pinnacle in the sea. It moved with surreal grace, but its body buckled with powerful muscles hiding beneath taut skin.

He edged to the water, slipping in.

“What are you doing?”

“Trying something.”

“Define ‘try’”

“I’m gonna hypnotize it.”

“You’re going to…what?”

“Hypnotize it.”

“Based on what scientific approach?”

“Scientific what? I dunno. Magic.”

“And if it doesn’t work?”

Wrenmae shrugged, “I’ll think of something else.”

“Or die.”

“Life isn’t worth living if you only do it to survive.”

“Spoken like someone with no idea what the point of life is.”

“Too late now, Zan, Unless you think you can stop me?”

“No, no, don’t mind me. I’ll just pray for deliverance.”

The shark adjusted its course, picking up on the new ripples entering its domain. It turned toward Wrenmae, approaching him slowly, cautiously. It was larger, certainly, but the creature, by now, had learned that there are those beings smaller than it possessing strange abilities. It was hungry, certainly, but it would not attack until it was sure.

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[Wrenmae]

Wrenmae treaded in the shallows, swallowing hard as the monster approached him. Reaching out with hid Djed, he sought to ensnare the creature, grip it by the mind and pull it into a calm reverie. Safety, serenity, ideas that the shark had learned to accept as mere fares of swimming filled its mind like whalesong, ebbing at its hunger. More curious than ravenous, it bumped Wrenmae with its nose. Wren felt the weight of the monster push him backward, its inquisitive forays still as powerful as a sharp jab. Reaching out, the mage touched its snout, running along the smooth skin broken here and there by thin scars. It was majestic. Terrible and majestic.

Wrenmae had studied sharks before. He knew them from the docks. The fishers cut them open, spilling their guts unceremoniously for the birds and bait. Their sandpaper skin, their soulless black eyes, their jagged teeth. But never had he seen one alive. The water rushing over its gills fluttered in and out. Once he’d been told gills take the air from the water, which most fish could not stand to stop swimming. Pushing back lightly on its snout, he sent the fish swimming by him, tracing a hand down its body, across its fins and bones, memorizing the shape of them. The creature passed him by, sliding back into the deep water with little more than a sigh of displaced ocean. Wrenmae was left with the image of the creature, the truth of its form reflected in his Djed enhanced eyes. He let it go.

Crawling out of the water again, he drew his blade and sat down near the bones. The first was the jaw of a shark, spread wide and lifeless against the harsh sunlight. It wasn’t terribly large, but more than enough to swallow Wrenmae’s arm, so he was careful with it. First he determined where he was draw the designs. It looked as though the only viable place were around the edges of the jaw itself. The item would hardly be called portable or even useful, but practice demanded he continue to create, to create and then create again.

[Wrenmae]

Zan floated out of the surf and over to Wrenmae, settling just above his shoulder. By now, however, Wren was fully immersed within the process. Out came his dagger, an awkward tool for the job, but enough to finish it. He traced the edge of a circle around the jawbone. The process here was one of tempered habit. He had to make the circle as exact as possible or risk losing the integrity of the object itself. Carefully he pushed the edge of the circle round and round, emulating the even edges of the sun. Just traces in the bone at first, no more defined than scratches that shaped the light face of a full moon. He reversed his grip, started in the circle itself. He drew the jaws, held by another individual. Crude, it stood as the first portrait on this jaw, followed by another circle. This circle he also traced with fine detail, doing his best to compensate for his minimal skills in the craft. In this one he drew the same person holding the jaw, but their face was raised and he emphasized the nostrils. He didn’t know if the magic would know this meant, smell, but he had to try. Again he worked with frenzied patience, doing his best to draw and redraw the shapes lightly until he was ready to carve them in.

The next circle depicted an individual bleeding, a stick figure with a trickle of liquid spinning from his arm. It was almost agonizing how long he spent on the project, overlapping his previous marks again and again till he was confident he had the circle perfectly. The last picture in the series on the jaw was of the stick figure holding the jaw out toward the one bleeding, having been led by the smell of blood. If the shark’s ability to sense the life of others was so strong, perhaps that sense could be imparted into this object as well.

SMELL he wrote into a circle above the others. BLOOD he wrote into a circle below. Together they made six circles, four in the center and one on top and bottom. The measurements were as perfect as he could make them, and he set the jaw on the ground hesitantly, surveying its work.

“Doesn’t look bad to me,” Zan said, soaring around his head, “What’s it for?”

“I expect it to track by the scent of blood,” Wrenmae confirmed, turning over one of the dried fish he’d taken from the shore and putting it beside the whale bone and jaw, “No telling whether it will work or not, so I’m holding off on awakening it till I finish these other projects.”

“Fair enough,” Zan said, ducking down and then soaring up, “I’m gonna test the limits of our connection.”

Wrenmae waved him away and the little familiar danced off across the waves, yelling out “Testing” every now and then, pausing like a bright glimmering sun above the water. Shaking his head, Wrenmae pulled up the fish and ran a hand across the dry scales. This kind of fish was a well known breed near Alvadas. It wasn’t caught all that often, or at least not eaten, because its body had a nasty habit of holding rigidly to its iron-like scales, even after death. Some had even fashioned these creatures into weapons, pounding other fish with the rigid scaled body of an Ironfish to save on buying a hammer.

[Wrenmae]

Wrenmae had found one washed up earlier, and had it baking in the sun till he was ready for it. The thing smelled awful, all the rot of a fish decaying, and yet the scales still shone a lurid iron hue. Wren liberated charcoal from his pack and rubbed three circles across the carcass, connecting them by lines. The first circle, the center, depicted words, another method of Malediction but no less effective. “Will Defend” was written with two lines etched off the body and connected to two other circles. The first circle said “Attacked by Flesh” and the second circle said “Attacked by Steel” The line represented the cause and effect. If the user of this item was attacked by either flesh or steel, “Will Defend” Would be activated.

It was a simple concept. Whether it meant the user would be forced to morph with scales or if they would simply have harder skin was not an effect the mage had control of. He placed the fish beside the jaws and laid back, the sun directly overhead and starting to wane toward the other horizon. He’d activate the items after he morphed…but today would necessitate his acquisition of that shark model. It wasn’t that he particularly liked the idea of tearing through the sea, murdering innocents, but should he fall from a ship and be unable to find land, he’d need a way to travel.

Slipping into the waves again, the water was cool on his skin. It whispered of secrets, treasures hidden throughout the Suvan. To them Wrenmae only asked to wait, that in time, he would discover them all.

[Wrenmae]

First he mimicked the skin, an easy but necessary morph. The quality of the skin was such that it felt rough rubbed one way and cut the skin rubbed the other. Similar to his Symenestra shape, the shark had tiny, nearly unseen, protrusions from their skin. While a Symenestra’s allowed them to scale walls, a shark’s was a topical defense. So Wrenmae focused on his skin, rippling and bubbling, growing grey and then darker grey, tiny dentricles sprouting from the surface of his skin and riding along the back of his hand. It took a few minutes to get it correctly, but this hadn’t been the first time the mage had tried that particular skin. It felt good to run his fingers across the insulated, thicker skin in the right direction, but rubbing it the other direction was painful, tiny teeth gripping into his flesh, seeking to tear it, bleed it.

Confident he had the skin down, Wrenmae laid down in the shallows, thinking about his lungs. The way air filled them, pushed them out, filled them, pushed it out. He imagined that from his neck, water seeping in and leaving air, and then being pushed out. At first, he feared the transformation. The idea that he might be stuck without the ability to breathe was, in a word, terrifying. He wondered if other morphers had this sort of problem, the lack of knowledge of what would happen afterward…if the change succeeded, or worse, it failed.

Focusing his Djed within, Wrenmae took a deep breath and began to reshape his insides. His lungs squished, retracted, then spread out. For a moment, he thought he might die. The skin on his neck split in eight places, four on either side, his lungs reaching up and attaching to them by the blood vessels. Dunking his head into the water, Wrenmae moved his neck around, seeking air, finding none. He was running out. His gills fluttered, and panicked, Wrenmae pushed himself out into the water. The rush of water into his gills suddenly exploded with air, and Wren gasped.

He could breathe.

[Wrenmae]

Exhilaration barely encompassed his sheer joy of discovery. Turning in the waves, he could even ignore the distant psychic connection between Zan and he. Suddenly the water around him seemed inviting rather than aberrant, and the ocean floor glittered with undiscovered prizes. Pushing low beneath the waves, Wrenmae poured morphing Djed into his eyes, expanding the sclera until they were black as a sharks, allowing for more light to infiltrate and light up this undersea world. He gripped his arms to his sides, reminding himself of the Dhani, Bones, and the shape of snake he’d taken. Slowly, skin fused into skin and his elbow pushed out into pectoral fins, long and elegant.

He initially had trouble with the tail, forcing his feet together and trying to shape what he had seen in the large white shark that had been here earlier. His feet twisted and flesh spun in circled, strange designs and shapes rising of liquid bone and skin. Annoyed, Wrenmae tried to remember the way the tail had looked, its majestic point, the way it spun the water, made it dance. Slowly, the bones and skin knitted into a tale, streamlining his body. The last change was the dorsal fin and his face, his back already pushing out the telltale fin of a shark to break the water with gliding ease. Wrenmae’s upper shoulder and head were pushing together and out, his nose taking up the whole of his face, his teeth becoming serrated and pointed. Twice he thought he might cut himself, alerting other predators to his incomplete change, but luck avoided it and soon his snout was pushing through the water and row after row of replacement teeth waited to be used in the back of his mouth. Still only the size of a man, however, the final change was the size.

Size was a difficult property to analyze. The bird had been condensing everything with magic, but this transformation called him to stretch. But he had to stretch everything in tandem, otherwise lose the consistency of the shape. Mustering up his inner djed, Wrenmae pushed the boundaries of his form, stretching out bone, flesh, sinew, and muscles. He knew how to coil muscle correctly from his Dhani and Isur form, and made sure the bones were dense and powerful…at least those bones actually in his body. The rest had faded to cartilage, allowing for a more flexible approach and greater dynamic movement in the water.

Upward he pushed his form, growing past six feet and onward towards ten. He stretched the water, swished his powerful tail and propelled forward into the open sea. Fifteen feet, twenty…and he stopped himself at near thirty feet, a massive example of the great white species, a creature that every bit embodied the horrifying tales of sea monsters told by wary fishermen. His body felt alive, felt powerful, and although the djed in his system was reaching a point of wearing out, Wrenmae took a few moments to turn in the waves, two swim, to cut the tops of them and then turn back to the cove.

He was transforming back as he existed the water, arms and legs loosening, head shrinking, body compacting, and skin replaced by his own. Exhausted, he threw himself onto the bank, grabbing his dagger and pricking a thumb. With the last bits of his useable djed for the day, he anointed each circle with a dab of blood and djed, awakening inner powers and bringing the fetishes to Malediction life.

There he lay, surrounded by bones, his familiar approaching from the bay.

And he smiled.

Today was a good day.

[Fallacy]

XP Award! Name:Wrenmae XP Award: Auristics- 2 Carving- 3 Malediction- 3 Familiarity- 3 Morphing- 2 Lore: The great white shark Carving with a dagger Tracing before carving Model: Shark Skin Model: Gills Model: Shark Eyes Morphing into a shark, first attempt Notes: Items: Shark Jaw : The shark jaw will give the user the ability to smell blood for several miles. The jaws ability can only be activated within water, and the blood smelt by using this ability must be in the same body of water the user is currently in. After use of the item the user will find that he/she will lose their normal sense of smell for the rest of the day. Ironfish : -no effect- The item is a dud I was unsure about giving you the model. It seemed to me that you should have spent a heck of a lot more time actually studying the shark instead of just trying to use 'auristics - at novice level' on it. So, I gave you a shark skin morph. If you want the full shark morph, please study the shark in depth I am aware at your current level of morphing you can learn models pretty fast, and so I gave you bits and pieces of things you wanted. Just not the entire shark model. Any questions or concerns about the rewards gained please send a PM