The Star 34

The next morning, Rohn and his right hand dueled for the rights to lead the clan. It was done honorably and with the intention of putting their disagreements to rest without damaging their respect for each other. The thing was, no matter the reason, it was done seriously.

In a surprising upset, Rohn had lost. Considering that Orison had secretly been gradually cleansing the man of impurities while bolstering health and vitality, the clan leader should have been at the top of his game. While the young mage healed Rohn's wounds, he discovered traces of a poison. It wasn't lethal and only caused some loss of focus and a little numbness but it was strong and lingering, having only been introduced to his system just before the fight.

In recall, he realized that the 'cup of courage' the matron gave to the challengers was the likeliest of culprits. She was an alchemist of decent standing herself and never let a morsel pass the lips of her family without first passing her inspection. It didn't take much effort to figure out her intentions.

While he figured out how he'd handle the new turn of events, he gauged key people's reactions. Behind the anger and shame, Rohn almost seemed relieved. His daughter looked heartbroken, illusion of her father's invincibility shattered before her eyes. The matron was an unreadable mask of stony resolve.

Walking up to the matron, he mentally messaged her. "Why? I can guess but hearing some reasons from you couldn't hurt."

Thinking loudly, unaccustomed to mind speech, she said, "You said that their futures were above or beyond the clan. I chose to believe you. Still, for myself and the ancestors, I'll not have it torn to ribbons simply because you don't care about it. "I'll support the split and allow the dissenters to flee our shade but the ones who stay will need a firmer hand, will desire it. This is the cleanest compromise between your priorities and my duty. I did not choose this lightly.

"Responsibilities now rest on the shoulder of another. Before my son takes up a lesser mantle and breaks my heart, take my blood elsewhere and expand their vision. If their gaze does not hunger for the starry sky you reveal, they will have a clan to come back to. But I fear if you stay, that will not be so."

With nothing to say in response, Orison nodded and walked back to Rohn.

The dispirited warrior said, "It seems my shadow has grown smaller and may not be large enough to cover you. Recent days have taken a toll on me... I know not what your plans may be but I will resign myself to switch roles with my former right hand until the turning of the new year. At that time, I will challenge him to a game of whit and regain my position."

Orison said, "Is that what you want? Until you officially declare that, you and Rohna have no clear position, no defined responsibilities. You are free to travel, experience the greater world, grow.

"This could be a good thing for you and your daughter... If that interests you, I wouldn't mind providing some company and continuing to mentor Rohna. She's reaching a stage where she needs to put her skills to the test anyway."

Rohn blinked owlishly at him. "No offense to your honor and nobility of spirit. But, I thought your first action would be to seek another shadow wide and deep enough to support your desire for rest."

Smiling widely, the young mage said in good natured humor, "Oh, I'm divorcing your broke a**. No love, no pleasure AND no luxury? What kind of marriage is that?"

Smirking, Rohn said, "Hey, I remember showing up at your door one night after a few shots of liquid courage in my belly, grinding a hard spear root between my teeth with thoughts of honor and glory to blind my eyes. You're the one who called those red sash girls to take your place in cooling my blood."

The young mage shuddered. "Luckily, you brought 'Honor' the spear maiden and 'Glory' the treasurer's daughter along with you for visual inspiration... I know I didn't give that healer's needful touch sign thing. But, it's reflexive to rub someone's back after they choke. I didn't realize I was sending you a visitation request. Sorry for the misunderstanding."

Rohn shook his head. "I handled it poorly. Truth told, I panicked from the perceived sudden interest and didn't want to disappoint. I had emptied my quiver fairly thoroughly the night before. Were you of my people, such a bold display of external aid would have been highly insulting...

"If we are to be traveling, I do have one request. Do not set me aside in the eyes of the clan. I'll not hold you to its meaning but your name may yet have some power to protect my mother while we are gone."

Orison sighed. "Fine... You know, I'd like to tease you and joke that from now on, you're the wife. But, there's so many nuances to everything a person does in Delver culture, I'm sure it'd mean a lot of things that are far from a joke. And because it's for your mom, you'd take it serious, get all depressed and make some more assumptions that would embarrass us both before it was done."

Rohn nodded grimly. "I'm in gratitude to your deeper understanding. Such a jest would have been quite costly if left uncorrected. Some damage, once done, would have been beyond repairing."

"No offense to your lovely people, Lord Umberdown. But, I'll breathe a little easier once we're on the road. How fast can you and Rohna reasonably be ready to leave?" the young mage asked.

Over his retreating back, Rohn said as he jogged to the manor, "Less than half a stone dial's mark... Daughter! Dark night, shadow's flight. Grab the hunter's kit from your little brother's room and replace the clothes. We leave in a quarter mark."

The girl, who had been receiving instruction from her grandmother, looked up in startled alarm and went dashing off like a devil was behind her.

The matron walked to the young mage and handed him two bags a few minutes later. "The personal effects from your room are yours. Perhaps among them is something you could keep to remember us fondly by. The other is coinage the clan has from days long past and a few stones of value to outsiders."

He absentmindedly threw them into his ring while keeping spirit sight on the frantically moving father and daughter. "That was quick. Was someone already cleaning the first wife suite for you before the duel was even over?"

"Yes." she said flatly.

He was about to make a sharp retort when he noticed a smoky presence right next to Rohna. In a whump of displaced air, he was as well, drawing a startled gasp from her. There was no one else in the room. Before he could inform her what the severe breach of protocol was about that saw him in her private space, he had 'stepped' again. In Rohn's private room, that hadn't seen a soul aside from himself since he became clan leader, he came face to face with the tier five avatar of a 'gloaming fey' man.

"Aaron, father of Glaucous and his deceased brother Malkanthor, world class fugitive and devil servant. This is one of the few echoes you actually have a good chance at seizing the resources sealed underneath Satyra's menhir. Walk away and that remains true," Orison said with a calm he did not feel.

The emotionless man said, "You are interesting. That means what you find of interest is also interesting by association. What would you be willing to do to keep your interests safe, I wonder."

"Absolutely nothing. Kill them. Kidnap and torture them. Do what you want. I'm not going to do a damn thing for you," the young mage replied, not twitching an eye as Aaron slowly twisted off Rohn's arms while the man shrieked.

The gloaming fey gave him a soulless smile as he dropped the dying man to the floor. "Perhaps the girl could move you where the father could not?"

Aaron went to shadow step back to Rohna's room and found himself unable to move.

"You like to play too much," Orison said right before the man's figure crumpled into and was encased by a small dark orb.

Two additional tier five avatars rolled out from the shadows and fired off sooty essence with deadly accuracy. Both shredded through the young mage, a couple of walls and all but vaporized Rohna. As one Aaron copy moved to release the orb trapped one, the other was scanning for traps. The silence and lack of air movement was the first tip off that something was wrong. They didn't have much opportunity to inspect for anything else as the surrounding space finished sealing off. The high powered glamour crumpled and faded with crushing pressure.

***

The matron snapped her fingers in front of the young mage's distant eyes. "Is something the matter?"

Orison looked down at the black orb with two tiny cracks that had appeared in his hand. "No. Here in just a second-"

A strong feeling of static electricity passed through everyone in Seaside Cave as a bewildering array, made by the young mage over months, collapsed. In its wake, the faint lines left by the burned out remnants of a prefabricated sealing array made by a tier six artificer were revealed.

"Ignore that. It's just a trap for diseased or poisonous vermin that went off. All the rushing around of Rohn and Rohna must have spooked something into attacking."

The matron said, "Isn't that quite a bit much for a vermin catcher?"

"Can't be too careful about them now that you don't have access to the alchematrix. A single plague carrier could wipe your entire clan out in less than a week... I doubt it but it's possible," he said, trying to control the sweating and hide the shaking that emptying nearly his entire magic essence pool in less than a few seconds had produced.

He sat down and began meditating in front of her as if she ceased to exist. The work of months was almost completely destroyed in fractions of a second. Had the sealing array closed off even a fraction slower, Aaron's avatars would have not only noticed what happened, they would have stopped it with ease. That would have been followed by an angered killing frenzy, no doubt.

Ignoring the matron's slightly annoyed comments, he brought out the manifestation of the grimoire. He fired off five high end mendings back to back in an effort to fix the cracks in the imprisonment pearl. It was a small chance but one of the avatars might have had a way to find and exploit them.

"No one wants to play by the rules they set. Everybody wants to cheat and then scream cheater when someone else starts winning, even a little bit. Might as well throw the f***ing rules out the window and act like godd*mn savages. No matter how powerful or wealthy, you're only supposed to have one avatar per world." Orison muttered internally.

Taking a few swallows from a flask, he stood back up and reached out to Gravat/Glaucous. Even backed by entanglement power, there wasn't so much as a 'find objective' line. He knew why there were more than three Aarons. One wasn't enough to subdue the blue half-giant. The gloaming fey had called avatar backup to overwhelm and kill his son.

Orison thought, "Sorry mystery seer. Triple Aaron's already FUBAR'ed your forecast and I need Gravat/Glaucous alive for the Satyrus echo merge as much as you. I have to break incognito to do that."

A sense of intuitive dread washed over him. His understandings of time-space laws weren't that deep or profound but they were spread out enough to trip his entanglement power's alarm bell. Switching to spirit essence, he burned half of his loose stores to latch onto Rohna and Rohn, sharing his resistance to causality.

There was only one place they could go that such a half cocked effort would be enough to keep them from being ripped from his side by time-space manipulation nonsense. They appeared in the cradle. Except, there were a few details that weren't quite right.

Inside his hand, the imprisonment orb was gone. In its place was a 'realer than real' sheaf of what looked like wheat with seven dark, slightly larger than pea, berries attached. There was also a small tear shaped aquamarine crystal brimming with potent, nearly primordially pure spirit essence. After a split second crisis decision, he stowed them away inside one of the scroll case's planar will seeds.

He had no choice. The 'wheat' was primed to drop its power of existence bolstering berries and wither away. If he put them in the snow globe, it would just be useful as a 'realness' wheat farm from there on out. And if he kept it or the special spirit essence crystal out in the cradle much longer, the tier seven artifact would have claimed them as resource replenishment.

Considering that a small collection of the original version of the wheat's realness berries were the very things Satyra had used to make her echo world, he doubted that he'd have a chance to get any again. The sudden erasure of the echo of Satyrus they were on was what caused it to drop. In some form of supernatural equivalent exchange, he was given the wheat and crystal in trade for the imprisonment orb. He suspected Satrya herself was responsible. Something must have happened on that world that she couldn't have contaminating the echoes at all costs.

Turning to explain the situation to Rohn and Rohna, he saw the man hugging his daughter like he was afraid she'd disappear if he stopped squeezing her half to death. Black whorls, dancing with baleful flames in Orison's spirit sight, lay nearly invisible on the Delver man's dark, 'sprinkle of dust' free skin. The man looked a few years younger but was a little spiritually older as well.

"Feel free to keep hugging the stuffing out of her but be careful what you say, alright? We are in a place called the Void Cradle. The more she knows, the less options she'll have leaving here." the young mage cautioned.

Rohna said, "I know not what has come over you, father, but you feel feverish. Are you unwell?... So, I am to remain ignorant in... whatever this is, mother?"

Rohn looked at Orison sharply before his laser focus shifted to the gold crystal medallion. Orison went to take it off but was stopped by Rohn in a movement that he could barely follow.

The man asked his daughter, "Has he performed his duties well and cared for you as he should?"

Rohna looked at him oddly, then said defensively, "He has cared for me greater than my own birth mother. That's a low bar but still... I would dare to say that he has taught me more secrets of mystery and power than the guardian ever taught his sons over the generations. No harm would he allow to befall us that he could prevent and no harm would he allow us to suffer that he could heal for all the time that he has been your wife."

Feeling a little green, Orison attempted to correct the skewed interpretation of truth but found himself suddenly distracted by the scroll case. The will seed he'd placed the sheaf of wheat and soul crystal in had begun to grow but had been stopped by the case. Forcing the excess energy to the other seeds, the scroll case connected his consciousness to them all once more.

While he numbly stammered a silent protest he couldn't put to words, Rohna took her father to task for 'slighting' him the 'one and only time' Rohn had been called to 'give comfort'. She listed a second hand account of the strong spirits, women and herbal stimulants Rohn had taken to his wife's chambers. Righteously, she accused her father of treating Orison like a begrudged charity of comfort.

She even claimed that if her father didn't treasure his wife, then she would steal him for her own once she was of age. Thankfully, the last was easily identifiable as a threat made from a purer place of love and respect, not romantic interest. After all the misplaced 'white knight' she was throwing down, the last thing he wanted to deal with was a puppy love crush from a girl he truly did care for like a daughter.

He was saved from knowledge of further embarrassing rolling misunderstandings by the overload of sensory information to his spiritual consciousness. On a deeper level, he understood what was happening. The scroll case was ensuring none of the seeds developed independent consciousness by branding his own onto them. Once the process was complete, the scroll case started resealing the seeds' feedback until only two of the three material plane seeds remained unsealed.

Consciousness input reeled back to a tolerable level, Orison came to. Instantly, he wanted knocked back out. Somehow he found himself a part of a sleazy romance novel cover scene. Draped almost artistically over Rohn's bent knee, he looked up into dark, soulful eyes gazing back down at him.

"What ails you, wife?" the powerfully built and admittedly handsome Delver man said.

"My pride and self esteem... It's terminal. Do not resuscitate," the young mage said on the verge of tears.