Great Hunt - Wasting Miasma: Mist on the Horizon

     The first sign of something wrong was a dimming of the midday sun.
     Wanderer looked up from where he was carefully threading through the reeds at the river’s edge, and saw what looked for all the world like thin wisps of cloud across the face of the sun… but knew somewhere deep in his gut that it wasn’t. There was something strange about it and the way that the tatters seemed to eddy and twist in the high atmosphere; the air had gone cold in a way completely at odds with the late summer heat of just a moment before.
     “Hrm.”
     He had been in the middle of some extremely lazy fishing, driving a fat mudfish further and further up the ever-narrowing rivulets of the marsh until it was all but beached, but he looked back down at the sound of a splash and saw to his irritation that the damned thing had managed to heave itself through the air and escape into deeper water.
     “Fortune-cursed–”
     At the very edge of his vision, he saw a feathery head pop up from the fold in his cloak-wrap where the crow had been napping.
     Another?
     Boldly said for someone who’s been sleeping the whole hunt through, he retorted, making a face as he lifted one foot to try and shake the muck free of his fetlocks.
     Don’t like fish.
     What? You like EVERYTHING, you greedy little bird.
     Not these fish. Taste of muck.
     They’re called mudfish. It’s in the name. And they’re tasty enough once they’re grown. If he was honest with himself, the deer wasn’t all that fond of mudfish either, but since they hadn’t seen any proper prey for two days now some fishing had seemed like a reasonable option. You could be helping me.
     Help let fish get away?
     Help me keep an eye out for crocodilians, for one.
     None here. Not swampy enough. And I’m tired.
     He couldn’t fault the bird for that. Since they’d made their escape from the Tourney, they’d had to be on watch for any chance that they were being pursued, and Cirrus had been taking the majority of watch duties thanks to being able to keep a better eye out from the sky. He’d earned his rest… but that didn’t mean that he didn’t manage to be characteristically annoying about it.
     Then sleep. Wanderer made his way out of the hock-deep water, wiping his hooves clean once he reached the grass of the riverbank. I think I’m done fishing for the day. Something feels… off, and I’m not sure what.
     That caught Cirrus's interest, because rather than tucking himself back under a fold of fabric the crow clambered his way up Wanderer’s shoulderstrap and shook his feathers into order. He cocked his head. You’re right.
     You feel it too?
     Bad things on the wind.
     The mage took a long, deep breath. I don’t smell anything.
     Not a smell. Just a feel. There was a sudden pressure on his back, and then Cirrus was aloft; his white-streaked wings catching the air and tossing the bird skyward with an effortlessness that Wanderer envied. He watched as his familiar spiraled up in the breeze, up until he was a dark speck against the oddly chilly sun.
     A moment later, he could feel wordless shock blaze through their mental link, and felt the feathers at the nape of his neck stiffen with dread.
     Cirrus! What is it? What do you see?
     BAD. The dark speck in the sky above him grew rapidly as his familiar came diving back down to sweep across the treetops at speeds that would put a raptor to shame. Follow me. Quickly!
     It wasn’t an explanation, but they hadn’t survived so long together without learning when to simply trust in one another. Wanderer sprang into a run, bounding through the waving grasses that brushed at his flanks; the land ahead rose into a ridgeline sprinkled with gold-leaved aspens, and there was enough adrenaline running through his veins that he was hardly even winded by the time he made it to the top.
     When he did, he understood the reason for his familiar’s urgency.
     The Tourney?
     They must have been wandering back in the direction they’d come these last few days, because though it was a long way off he could faintly make out the bright tents of the Grand Tourney dotting the distant hillside. But the Tourney itself wasn’t the cause for concern; instead, his eyes were locked on the billowing mass of dark mist that had all but enveloped it. Even as he watched, he could see the miasma twist and move against the wind. Tatters of it escaped skyward here and there, trailing across the blue above like grasping claws.
     He had no innate ability to sense magic, none of the coveted amulets that granted anyone that same power, but anyone looking at that cloud would have been able to tell that it was wrong.
     What IS that?
     Bad, Cirrus repeated grimly. The wind was in their faces, and the crow was using it to hold his place overhead.
     A mage must have corrupted.
     It was all he could think of. Practically everyone at the Tourney had been a mage, Order or otherwise, and he couldn’t imagine that even the most powerful uncorrupted mage could make something on the scale of that distant eruption of mist.
     Corruption was every mage’s fear, and the source of so many of the problems he and his ilk currently faced. Too much power changed the user, and it had been the source of monsters since time immemorial; far too many, in the last few years, and all of Faline had three Corruptions fresh in memory after the summer before. He’d managed to avoid crossing paths with the beast that had rampaged through the Jungle, only seeing the aftermath of its passing, but it had been more than enough for a grim reminder that he might one day face the same fate.
     Corruption meant losing every scrap of self; every part of a mage’s identity or personality corroded away by uncontrollable, overwhelming magic. And it meant breathtaking amounts of power… with no sense of self left to hold the leash.
     In the middle of the Tourney? And with Mead, one of the largest and most prosperous villages of central Ivras only a stone’s throw away?
     It would be a massacre. Likely already was.

     He remembered the smell in the air that day, a strange sterility in the constant rich smell of loam and growing things that usually permeated the jungle. Air usually thick and humid had gone oddly dry. And then, further along, the smell of rot.
     It had once been a mage called Ravenous, he’d learned later, and for reasons that hadn’t been hard to understand as Wanderer had gingerly walked through the scar it had left across the land; the verdant grass and mosses underfoot wilting into a decaying mess of stagnant water and dying plant life, the trees slumping and collapsing under their own weight as they rotted from the inside out. It hadn’t taken long to realize he was walking through a graveyard, countless small creatures sinking into the muck, bodies sunken and caving in where they’d fallen in their tracks. Even Cirrus, who normally had no compunctions about carrion, had known better than to disturb the remains.
     It was perhaps the first time he’d come across something that unsettled him so deeply. Even magical talents that were considered ‘dark’–his own included–had never felt like this when he’d encountered them; the corruption that lingered had been faint, but enough to shake him to his core,
     By his reckoning, he’d come across the great beast’s wake days after it passed through. But he’d still been able to feel its power tugging hungrily at his magic, his own vitality. And he’d seen clearly enough what had happened to those who’d succumbed to that pull.
     He’d sworn then and there to never let that happen to him.

     We should be far away from here, Cirrus said.
     His familiar’s voice was jarring enough to break him out of his recollection, and Wanderer shook his head uncomfortably; even now, a good year later, it was so easy to remember the visceral feeling of corruption’s echoes. And now this! Once again, a mage giving in to–falling into–that wrongness. There was no reason for him to be involved. There was no obligation to help, especially when he’d been running from the Tourney for perfectly good reasons, especially when every Witchfinder in Ivras was about to descend upon the place. Wanderer was a wild mage with no stake in this. If anything, a raging monster thinning the ranks of the Order’s forces benefited him.
     And yet…It hadn’t been pragmatic to stop Shira either, had it? But something inside of him had still rebelled against simply standing aside and watching murder carried out.
     There was a shape in the mist on that far hillside; something dark, something huge, twisting in the miasma that surrounded it like a leviathan breaching the ocean’s surface. It was only visible for a moment, but that moment was enough to send icy clarity searing through him.
     It was wrong. It was wrong.
     His feet were moving without thinking, slow and tentative at first, and then faster until he was loping along at a steady, ground-eating pace down the hill… in the direction of the monstrous cloud in the distance. Cirrus swooped low alongside him, feathers bristling.
     What are you doing?? Wanderer?!
     Something stupid, I’m sure.
     But he kept running.