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Dream II - Chapter 17
🕑 Added 2022-06-23 18:21:56 +0000 UTC- - - - -
Race: Saurian
Bloodline Powers: Improved Strength, Rending, Firebreath
Greater Mysteries: Fire (Noble) 4, Wind (Noble) 2
Lesser Mysteries: Heat 4, Oxygen 4, Embers 4, Pressure 4, Current/Flow 4
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Pothas strode past Samazzar, a massive smile on his face as he walked into the center of his office. What looked like a stone coffin, twice the wind master’s size, stood in front of his desk. Sprouting from its sides and back were copper pipes that ended modified blacksmith’s bellows. Rose looked up from where she had been working on one of these pipes and nodded at Pothas’ approach before returning to her task.
“Is it ready?” The middle aged man asked excitedly, walking up to the stone rectangle and placing his hand on a viewing window made from heavy, magically grown crystal.
“Almost,” Rose replied, pushing her hand through a hatch built into the artificially widened nozzle of one of the bellows. “The deeptreader gills, hydra vocal cords, and karrana resin are all seated in their pumps. I’m just struggling to make sure that the focusing funnels are-”
An audible metallic click cut the magus off. Rose leaned down, putting her good eye next to the copper apparatus to get a better look before smiling and pushing the hatch back into place.
She stood up, removing a small rag that had been tucked into her belt and wiping the excess oil and grime from her hands.
“Never mind. The focusing funnels are in place. Once Percival is done sulking, we’re ready to begin the experiment.”
Pothas frowned slightly, angling his head upward. A moment later Sam felt the faintest pulse of magic race through the air. He shivered. Whatever the wind master was doing, it went a step beyond simple passive observation with the mystery. Every gas Samazzar could sense expanded slightly, brushing across his scales as air swirled gently in the formerly still room.
His eyes widened and Sam staggered as information rushed into him. Normally, the first and second levels of the mystery of wind provided so much data that it almost overwhelmed him. Only now did he realize how limited his horizons were.
Ordinarily, the mystery would reveal silhouettes, areas where the wind was not, creating an almost black and white painting of Sam’s surroundings in his inner eye, but Pothas made the entire world scream with color. He could feel the wind whispering over everything. His vision was no longer restricted to the simplicity of ‘air or no air.’ Samazzar could sense the hair on Rose’s head as the mystery tousled it, the edges of Pothas’ desk and the individual spines of books on the nearby shelves as the wind flowed past.
He could also feel Percival, hiding out on the balcony with his head in his knees and his arms wrapped around his legs, just out of sight of the large windows. Air under Pothas’ control swirled around him, illuminating the young man’s short hair, spindly limbs and robe for anyone that had the ability to perceive the mystery.
Then, ever so gently, the wind curled under his back and arms, lifting the boy up and setting him on his feet. The effect faded as Pothas released it, leaving Samazzar reeling as Percival opened the glass door to the balcony and stomped back into the office.
His fellow apprentice was still visible in Sam’s senses, but it all felt so muted now. He could still see the boy’s outline, but in an instant the individual strands of hair and the ruffles in his clothing disappeared.
“Are you ready Percival?” Pothas asked, making no mention of the boy’s petulant outburst. “The Cribahn Coffin requires three practitioners to operate it, but Rose will be doing most of the difficult work. Sam and you will just have to operate your bellows and monitor the wind flow through the distribution pipes.”
Percival glared at Samazzar before slouching over to the metal and stone apparatus and stopping on the side opposite the saurian. Sam looked in Percival’s general direction, face screwed up in confusion. Eventually, he gave up on understanding the young human and turned his attention back to Pothas.
“Master,” he began, “what exactly are we doing? I know that this is some sort of experiment, but beyond that no one has really explained what my role will be.”
“Very good,” Pothas replied, perking up at the chance to talk about his work rather than his moping apprentice. “The Coffin is named after its inventor, Alberto Cribhan. It allows wind or water practitioners to pump their substance of choice over reagents attuned to their mystery. In this case you will be pumping air through the vocal cords of a prismatic rock hydra. This activates the energy stored in the item which is then focused through an array of crystals. With any luck, the pressure inside the Coffin will rise to the level where it could be used to crush steel.”
“Are you going through a baptism?” Samazzar asked excitedly. “I don’t think I’ve ever even read about what a baptism for a practitioner of your level looks like.”
The middle aged man chuckled, shaking his head as he reached up to clap a hand on Samazzar’s back.
“Oh no,” Pothas replied in between quiet chortles. “By the mysteries no. Not all of us are as adept at learning magic.”
“No young Sam,” he continued, removing his hand from Samazzar’s back and opening the stone and crystal door to the Coffin, “I’m far from ready for a baptism. At the higher levels, it takes months if not years of study before you are ready to even attempt a baptism. Today’s experiment will mostly involve Rose transforming the gasses pumped into the chamber into a number of variants, but you don’t have to worry too much about the specifics. Just follow her instructions and everything will be fine.”
Then, Pothas stepped inside, shifting the stone block of a door into place before winking at Sam through the crystal window.
“Get to your bellows Sam,” Rose called out from behind the rectangle of stone. “I’ll tell you when to pump harder and when to lay off. Your job is to use your senses to monitor the flow of wind through the piping. It’ll take a couple of heaves before you get the hang of it, but if you monitor the flow carefully, you’re bound to learn something.”
“It’s sweaty and boring work,” Percival grumbled. “That’s what you’ll learn. That your shoulders hurt and that you need to take a bath when you’re done.”
Rose opened her mouth to respond but caught herself, instead giving Samazzar a tight, pained smile before returning to her position at the rear of the Coffin. He watched her grasp the leather wrapped handle to the bellows located behind the apparatus. She pushed it down, compressing the leather-reinforced cloth accordion and sending a blast of wind through the copper pipes.
Samazzar’s eyes popped open as his sense of the mystery went wild. The air surrounding the bellow transformed as the bellows pulled it in. He wasn’t sure exactly what happened to it, but any oxygen in the gas disappeared instantly and it began to behave differently. Sam couldn’t put his finger on how exactly it was different from normal air. Maybe it was the way it heated up at an ever so slightly different rate as it passed through the reagent chamber and focusing pipes. On the other hand, he was fairly sure that the gas was more sluggish than normal air, not moving quite as quickly despite the amount of force pushing it from behind.
Then it hit the reagents, and the feeling of wrongness doubled. The pressurized gas jetted into something and was magnified. For every handful of wind that was pushed into the chamber ten came out. The exiting gas was angry. Fast and under enough pressure that the copper pipes groaned, barely able to accommodate its fury.
“More!” Pothas’ shout was muted from inside the stone box. “More and faster!”
Rose brought the handle to her bellows up, pausing for a second as she made eye contact with first Percival and then Samazzar.
“You heard Master. On the count of three.”
“One,” she said the words calmly but her eyes were distant. The gasses around his legs shifted, the Oxygen leaving them in a second as Rose transformed them.
“Two.”
Creaking groans filled the room as all three of them pushed up on their bellows. Sam clenched and released his muscles, preparing himself for the exertion ahead. He hadn’t spent as much time in the forge as Dussok, but already his arms ached in anticipation.
“Three.”
Samazzar slammed the leather clad handle downward. The apparatus resisted him, the gas filled bellows struggling as he transferred his entire weight into the groaning lever.
Air rushed out of the bellows, pushing its way through the reagent chamber. Inside Sam, it was like a musician plucked the string of a lute. A deep resonate wail erupted from the device, burrowing through his flesh until it shook his lungs and bones.
In the pipes, the magically enhanced air rushed upward toward the coffin, some sort of enchantment or magic preventing any of the high pressure air from flowing back into the reagent chamber. Samazzar didn’t know if it was Rose, Pothas, or simply a property of the coffin, but some force served as a ratchet, only letting wind and magic flow inward where it built up around Master Pothas.
“Again!” Rose shouted, and Sam wrenched his handle upward.
The bellows gasped, pulling in more of the altered air as Samazzar’s arms trembled. He stopped when the lever reached its apex, mouth open as he sucked in oxygen. Across the room, Sam felt Rose working her bellows before he heard her command.
“And push!”
Sam wrenched the handle downward again, sending more of the strange gas through the hydra vocal cords. It screamed again, a bellow of challenge from a great predator that sent Samazzar’s heart skipping once more.
He could feel the air vibrating as the pressure crushed it down and forced it through the vocal cords. It changed. The organ magnified it, turning a whisper into a scream that shook the entire room.
Once again something inside Samazzar responded to the sound. The vibration, really just rapid fluctuations in pressure, and flow of the air felt familiar. The deafening clamor coming from the copper pipes of the Coffin had elements of the minor mysteries that Sam had already learned, but at the same time, there was something new. Something that he almost recognized.
It was like returning home to the kobold caves for the first time. He recognized a couple faces and felt like he should know many more, but he couldn’t quite put a name to the specific individuals he encountered.
Rose was shouting out a count, barely audible over the wheezes and groans coming from the Coffin, but at the same time, Samazzar didn’t need it. He could perceive her arms beating a steady rhythm as she worked her bellows, and it only took the barest corner of his concentration to match her stroke for stroke.
Instead, he focused his attention on the air passing through his reagent chamber. With each heave of the bellows, the hydra vocal cords buzzed, almost too quickly to perceive. Sound washed over Sam, shaking his entire body and numbing his hands.
His muscles were sore, but he barely even noticed them, instead letting the waves of vibrating air curl and flow around him. Sam’s eyes watered as the shrieks and screams from the bellows rattled them. His ears began to ache from the constant noise, and it might have been his imagination but Sam could have sworn that he felt a trickle of liquid trailing from them down the side of his face.
But none of that mattered. In the Coffin, a vortex of energy unlike anything he’d ever seen surrounded Pothas. The air pressure was beyond solid, to the point that it would be easier for a traveler to walk through a dirt embankment than pass through the morass of gas surrounding his master.
Another primal scream of challenge came from Samazzar’s bellows, and this time the noise almost knocked him off of his feet. The air vibrated, barely muted by the copper sphere the vocal cords were located in before its echo slammed into him with the force of a runaway carriage.
Sam’s breath was knocked from his lungs and tears flowed down his face as his body struggled to deal with the sound. Then, it clicked.
This was an attack. The hydra the vocal cords must have been taken from a monster that had a bloodline ability that allowed sonic assaults. There was no other option.
Sound permeated everything, vibrations transferring from the copper to the air and back into Samazzar’s scales. His bones ached as they shook in time with the screams.
Then, everything snapped into focus. Sound was like Samazzar’s minor mysteries. It both was and wasn’t pressure and flow at the same time. It was waves like a lake or an ocean, each made from air pressure and-
Information flowed into him, robbing the breath from his lungs. Instinctively, he suddenly knew how vibrations in liquids and solids translated into sound. How the longer pulses were deeper shouts while the short pulses were high pitched yelps.
Somehow, Sam managed to keep pumping away at the bellows. He wasn’t even aware of time passing as he gasped for breath. Thoughts raced through his head as Samazzar tried to process what he was learning, questions leading only to more questions as if he were chasing his own tail.
“Stop!” Rose shouted. Samazzar couldn’t hear her. The hydra screams had all but deafened him minutes ago, but somehow he could feel the words as they left her mouth.
He blinked, staggering back from the bellows. Sam couldn’t hear anything, but at the same time, he could feel sound. Somehow, simply by touching the disturbances in the air with his mind, Samazzar knew where the noises were coming from, and roughly how he would have perceived them if it hadn’t been for the ringing tinnitus that assaulted his more mundane senses.
Inside the Cribahn Coffin, Samazzar felt Pothas shake his head in wonder. The middle aged man was barely breathing. His eyes were closed and Samazzar could feel the practitioner converting a small fraction of the air he was consuming into oxygen.
The pressure around the man was beyond anything Sam had ever felt. Instinctively, he knew that if he were exposed to one half the wind that Pothas was experiencing, it would go far beyond a baptism. Samazzar simply would have been crushed to death in a matter of seconds.
Pothas opened his eyes, a thin sheen of magic protecting the sensitive organs. He looked at Sam intently through the crystal viewing window in the front of the coffin.
Sam saw the man’s lips move. The words weren’t audible. Even without the strange distortions caused by the heavily pressurized air in the Coffin, Pothas was practically whispering. Still, with Samazzar’s new senses he could read the vibrations transferred through the crystals as if Pothas was standing right next to him.
“Another mystery? Just a box full of surprises aren’t we Sam?”
The air master winked at him.
