It took them nearly an hour to cut their way deep into the dense woodlands of the Plane. The Delver team was far more effective at putting down ants than any Attacker team Caen had seen here. They operated with coordination born from their number and seamless teamwork.
Since they all wore enchanted eye gear, their group moved swiftly under the cover of darkness. They killed every ant they ca across, including a particularly large one with sturdier limbs and mandibles.
Caen hadn’t gotten a proper look before the Delver team viciously pelted it with spells and munitions. Whether that killed the larger ant or rely caused it to retreat into the tunnel, he could not say.
He regaled Sh’kteiro with details of everything that had happened since discovering Mimicry. Sh’kteiro listened quietly as Caen described the events of his Edict bloodline awakening. When he began recounting the Enoptromantic ritual in the mirror-room, Uncle Teiro, much like his mother had, insisted on not hearing what Caen had seen in there.
“It’s for you and the Eye alone to know,” he’d said, so Caen kept so of his questions to himself.
“Alright, Uncle. Your turn. What was that thing you did earlier?”
“Light,” Sh’kteiro said simply, smiling that smile of his.
Caen gave Sh’kteiro a flat look. “Care to explain what that ans?”
In answer, Sh’kteiro took out a pipe from within his monk’s habit. It was a twisted and curved cylinder of engraved tal, about the length of his forearm and as thin as two fingers held together. This was a family heirloom which Caen’s maternal grandfather had given Sh’kteiro. The spout on one end began to spill out tendrils of smoke once Sh’kteiro actuated the pipe. “Watch closely,” he said.
Caen watched him and the pipe for several monts before glancing around, not quite sure what he was supposed to be paying attention to. The Delver team was positioned several paces ahead of them, engaging dozens of ants without any apparent difficulty. Sh’kteiro was looking ahead, so Caen hesitantly did the sa.
The ants began to chitter more loudly. Caen caught sudden movent behind him and to his left, beyond where Sh’kteiro stood.
Sothing sprang out of a hole in the ground a good twenty or so feet away. It was tall––taller even than Caen was––and moved with a speed that defied its mass. Its soul structure was more… ‘imposing’ than any ant Caen had seen so far.
He was already reaching for his holster, a warning on the tip of his tongue. Uncle Teiro placed a placating hand on his shoulder, turned to the very quickly approaching Planar creature, and pointed the pipe at it.
For the briefest instant, a brilliant beam of light shot out of Sh’kteiro’s speculon, not the pipe. It was a color Caen had never seen in his life before. Every palatable and beautiful, and ponderous aspect of hue was mashed together into sothing majestic and profound. It speared through the ant’s head, and the creature slid the rest of the way towards them, carried by nothing but inertia.
Its soul structure broke apart into so many wispy pieces, dissipating like the smoke from an extinguished candle. A smoldering hole the size of an eye had been gouged through the giant ant’s head.
Caen turned raised brows to his uncle, who kept that faux-serene smile on his face, pipe spilling smoke uselessly.
Several Delver team mbers had whirled back, aiming weapons and spells. So of them gaped openly, and the woman who had co to speak with his uncle earlier now eyed the still-actuated pipe with wariness.
"That was incredible," Caen said in Olden Vishic. He was awed. "How?"
“Light, like I said.” Sh’kteiro turned off his pipe and restored it to its place within his habit. "But not just any light. That ca directly from the Plane of the Speculant Eye. It’s invisible. Well beyond the range of what human sight is capable of."
Since early childhood, Caen’s mother had been telling him stories about the wondrously alien and invisible light within that Plane. Without a speculon, it would have been all but impossible to see. So experiences could not be passed along in mory crystals.
Questions tumbled through Caen’s mind. Had Sh’kteiro summoned the invisible light through his speculon? Was his mother capable of the sa thing? Could Caen himself do this as well? Here he was thinking that nothing else could match Passionfire in raw power, but this…
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"How do I do it?" Caen asked, trying and failing to suppress the keenness in his voice.
"You’ll have to start viewing yourself as a conduit of the Plane of the Speculant Eye," Sh’kteiro said. The group ahead of them began to move, and they followed. "That will require so extended ditation on your part, but it’s not rare for relatives of ours around your age to achieve this. It will allow you to channel the Planar light through your speculon."
Sothing about the way he’d phrased that brought Fermien’s description of how Ardor worked to Caen’s mind.
"Just as you can pull light from this world into your speculon, you can also push light through your speculon into this world. The light can be harmful, as you just saw. It can be used to send a signal, like I did with you earlier. Or it could just be purely aesthetic—privately so, though, because, well, it’s invisible.” As Sh’kteiro said this, a spiral of wispy, otherworldly light twisted and danced in very intricate patterns around his speculon. Each color was mind-bending, each shape surreal.
“Are you coordinating all that by yourself?” Caen asked, hiding nothing of how impressed he was.
Uncle Teiro laughed. “Well, of course I am. I’m an old man. Fluid control cos naturally with long decades of practice. You’ll see.” His uncle was in his early nineties, though he didn't look it.
“Did you use Divination to spot the ant ahead of ti?" Caen asked.
"So very liberal support from Divination magic, yes. But for the most part, well, that’s just one of many advantages that co with being a Percipient, I suppose.” He dropped his voice into a conspiratorial whisper, even though they were speaking a dead language no one here would understand. “I can see all around at once. 360-degree vision.”
“What?” Caen asked, hiding none of his surprise.
“I don’t always have it on, though. It’s one of the more annoying traits of being a Percipient. You’ve been in a mirror-room yourself. It can be very disorienting seeing your body move from multiple angles at the sa ti.”
Caen shook his head, still baffled. “If I could see all around , I’d never turn it off.” The applications to Mimicry alone would be astounding. For one, he wouldn’t ever need to constantly keep people in view just to retain a connection. “Are you sure there isn’t a way for to get this before Percipient?”
Uncle Teiro laughed long and hard at that.
* * *
Caen noticed that there were fewer and fewer holes in the ground the deeper into the Plane they went. The Delver team led them to a solitary hole. Ten mbers of the team with rifles slid in, followed by ten more.
Caen and Sh’kteiro hung back at a safe distance, though a part of Caen wished that he could have watched the Delver team clearing out the tunnel in real ti. He could hear gunfire and projectile spells littering the crazed, high-pitched chittering of ants. It was a cacophony of skin-crawling noises.
The Delver team called out muffled codes to themselves, entering the tunnels in groups. And soon, only one of the original twenty-three remained outside the tunnel, presumably to ‘guard’ Sh’kteiro, who stood with his eyes closed, obviously doing sothing arcane. Diviners possessed magical faculties of their own that allowed them to sense things beyond the range of mundane perception.
In the hour it took the Delver team to clear out the tunnel, Caen inspected the soul structures of awakened trees in the vicinity. Whenever he connected to one, the ground around it seed to dim, and while the tree’s roots faded out from his physical perception completely, the visual elents of its soul structure continued much farther down. In the course of scanning the trees, he noticed sothing in the far distance.
Through the trees, he could see one terribly large tree, nearly quadruple the size and girth of the other awakened trees in the Plane. He’d missed it before. This greatly resembled the tree he’d seen within the ntal affliction of the girl whom his mother had treated. Caen connected to the giant tree imdiately and was shocked. The portions of its soul structure covering its roots stretched out hundreds of feet deep and wide, no doubt lacing through and around the root systems of the surrounding trees. Its roots ran beneath his feet and well past. There were three prominent thread clusters in its soul structure, unlike the two in the surrounding trees.
Just as Caen began to isolate the least familiar of these thread clusters, a Delver team mber within the tunnel called out to them. Sh’kteiro’s eyes snapped open, and they all went down into the tunnel together.
The hole was quite steep, and while there were gouges in the compact soil, it was simply easier to just slide down the four or so dozen feet. Caen struggled to maintain his connection to the tree. Knowing that its roots stretched into this tunnel system helped. He maintained the unraveling connection long enough for him to spot sufficient portions of the tree’s roots crawling upon the ceiling and walls of the cavern.
Even from down here, he could see the entire outline of the colossal tree as represented by its soul structure. All the soil and matter between him and it had dimd to the point that they were as epheral as a phantom.
The tunnel was cavernous, and its ceiling and walls were almost entirely covered in tree roots. Many of them, even now, writhed and stirred, shredded body parts of ant corpses being pressed into the soil overhead as dark blood dripped down.
The ground was soiled with blood and various pieces of ant parts, but the roots had evidently busied themselves feasting on the bulk of the corpses. Even the colossal tree had participated in the feast. Several of its barbed roots clutched ant carcasses, many of which were already halfway pulled into the soil.
Caen very carefully avoided the walls and panned the ceiling with so caution. His respect for the Delver team had gone up a notch since they hadn’t lost any of their mbers.
“I’ve gotten everything I need,” Sh’kteiro said to the woman who appeared to be the team lead, after a few minutes. “We’re leaving.”
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