Great Hunt - Wasting Miasma: Inertia

     Time passed.
     How long exactly was hard to say; day and night meant precious little beyond a slight brightening or dimming of the fog, and that stubbornly persisted with no sign of relenting. Wanderer mostly marked the passage of time by the wax and wane of gnawing hunger. He slept when he had to, ate sparingly when he saw no other choice, and waited for something to change.
     It wasn’t as though he had much in the way of choice, by now. As he’d expected, it hadn’t taken long for Namarast and the Crown to send their best and brightest–those who hadn’t already been at the Tourney, that is–and the perimeter of the mists had quickly become a prepared battleground. The ground had been cleared of any cover that could have hidden someone coming out of the mist, with the gorse tangles and occasional trees uprooted wholesale; some yards back, he could see that great wooden spikes had been dug into the ground in endless rows facing inwards. And there were watchers, day in and day out; distant forms of the Witchfinders waiting for any sign of the monster that the corrupted mage had become.
     He would have admired their diligence a lot more if it weren’t for the fact that it meant nobody else was escaping the mist either.
     He’d come across more than a few mages who’d managed to buck the spell, and within the fog there’d come to be a certain understanding; everyone helped, and nobody asked too many questions. Wanderer had stood wither to hock with wild mages and Order mages alike, and he’d seen more than a few instance of mages coming up short with startled recognition in their eyes as they crossed paths with old allies or enemies… but there hadn’t been much fighting, not that he’d seen. For now, at least, the common thread of threat and the Corrupted held them tenuously together.
     But not everyone had stayed in the mist. The unspoken goal they all shared was twofold; find a way to destroy the great skeleton, and wake those that they could. And while they’d managed to shake some of the dreamers out of sleep, not everyone was ready to stay in the waking nightmare to join a seemingly stalled fight. Some only wanted to get out, and found comfort and not dread in the idea that the Archon’s Witchfinders were only a hoofsbreadth away.
     Every time he’d helped bring someone to the edge of the fog, it had taken only moments for them to be pounced on by the watchers who lined the perimeter. And it was hard to be certain, but Wanderer felt more than a little sure that their ‘rescue’ hadn’t looked entirely friendly. Less rescuing a survivor, and more taking a prisoner for examination.
     His thoughts fell back to Yorro and Elene, at times, and he hoped they’d managed to make it clear.
     In the mist, though, things were desperate enough that the deer didn’t have much time to think about the world beyond the Corrupted’s influence. Even if he wasn’t sure of how long it had been, it had been long enough. There were still too many hooved who slept; who’d been sleeping since the mist first fell, and though they had to be sustained by magic to some degree since they were still breathing the passing days were beginning to take their toll.
     Mages who’d come to the Tourney well-fed and vital and shining with health were beginning to waste away, cheeks becoming sunken and bones more prominent where they lay sleeping. Wanderer had spent more than a few days helping stand guard for the handful of healer-mages who’d been trapped in the mists, watching as they desperately tried to stave off the effects of so many bodies lying motionless day after day.
     They were beginning to lose people. And for those still trapped in that dreaming sleep, there was only so much time that they had left.
     The only way to end this, the only real way, was to kill the corrupted monstrosity that had spawned it all; and who knew what would come after that, but it had to be done. But the creature seemed as untouchable as ever. If it was affected at all by the magic being sporadically thrown at it–less and less, as would-be attackers grew frustrated at how little their efforts seemed to matter–it didn’t show it. The vast skeleton had settled in the square at Mead’s heart, and there it had sat ever since with its bony frame towering into the mists overhead.
     At this point, they were all just waiting for something to change.
     He would go check on the damn thing periodically, feeling revulsion shudder through his body every time he drew too close. Though he kept a wary distance by sticking to the town’s rooftops, Wanderer couldn’t shake the feeling that he could have walked right up to the thing and it wouldn’t even have noticed; it didn’t seem to notice anything, not the rain when it fell or the fallen sleepers scattered around it or the occasional gout of fire or blinding lash of lightning. It didn’t take any care to avoid those who’d fallen under his spell–Wanderer had found the horrifying aftermath of such a huge being walking streets littered with those not capable of getting out of the way–but it didn’t seem to go out of its way to harm them either. It didn’t seem to respond to anything at all.
     Maybe it was dreaming too, though he couldn’t begin to fathom the horrors that Corruption-addled mind would surely spawn.
     In the end, Wanderer supposed, his guess was as good as anyone else’s. As progress slowed to a crawl, he’d actually had the time and opportunity to talk with some of the others trapped in the mist alongside him; there were more wild mages than he would have thought would be present at the Tourney, although recognizing how powerful many of them were certainly explained why they hadn’t been afraid of being found out. But wild or Order, guard or renegade, they all soon found that their shared horror of the Corrupted was an easy common thread. It was enough.
     The corruption was always there, laced through the mist and lingering in his nose like a rotten smell he just couldn’t shake. Some days Wanderer felt it more acutely than others; on those days his instincts clamored at him to leave, to get as far away as he could from this terrible thing that should not be. He couldn’t leave the mist, but on those days he would go to the far end of what had been the Tourney grounds in the hopes that at least a symbolic distancing would help soothe his restless mind.
     It rarely did, but it was all that he had.
     That’s how he found himself standing knee-deep in the river one evening, as the last fading rays of daylight died away and the fog faded from a hazy gold into darkness. Fish were the one reliable source of food he still had left to him, and thankfully the river was substantial enough that he was managing to scrape by for now. It took a lot of patience, a lot of waiting and some helpful maneuvering by Cirrus to drive dinner to him, but every few days he made his way down here so that they could take the edge off of a hunger that was all to present lately.
     His eyes scanned the water’s surface intently, fully focused and alert for any disturbance in the ripples. The deer was standing on a wide scree of rock and gravel where the river ran broad and shallow, hooves planted firmly and head bent low; somewhere downstream, he could hear muffled wingbeats as Cirrus skimmed low across the water.
     Two fat fish. They’re fast– to your left!
     The crow’s form appeared in the fog so abruptly that Wanderer wouldn’t have seen him in time without the verbal warning. Darting before him, a pair of silver shapes were almost breaking the surface; as they closed on Wanderer, one broke right into the deeper water, but the other broke left across the shallows…
     Wanderer lunged, head snapping forward and scooping the fish out of the water with his antlers. It landed with a wet splat on the stones at the river’s edge, and he splashed his way over and seized it with sharp teeth before it could manage to flop its way back into the current. The give of its flesh in his jaws was satisfying even if the coldness of its watery blood wasn’t; walking higher up the shore and shaking himself almost dry, the deer dropped his catch to the sand and paused to spit some loose scales out of his mouth.
     He braced a hoof against its still-flopping body and ripped loose a strip of tender white flesh with a single jerk of his head; it wasn’t what he wanted, didn’t have the satisfaction of warm meat, but at least it would momentarily quell his stomach’s growling. As Cirrus came flapping over to perch on a rock nearby, Wanderer flipped a scrap of fishskin his way.
     Here. Come take your share.
     His familiar caught the scrap with a smooth, precise snap of his beak, but stayed right where he was.
     I’m not hungry. You finish it.
     That brought the mage to an abrupt halt mid-bite, and he eyed Cirrus with concern.
     What?
     I don’t need it.
     You also don’t pass up free meals. You earned this as much as I did. Normally Cirrus would be dancing around between his hooves and risking getting stepped on out of eagerness to raid a kill. The bird was a little glutton under the best of circumstances, and while Wanderer had never hesitated to share with his hunting partner it was unheard of for Cirrus to turn something down like this.
     He squinted at the bird suspiciously. Did he look a little… guilty?
     Unless you’ve already eaten?
     Cirrus was very busy preening himself all of a sudden, and Wanderer knew he’d hit the mark.
     You have! Cirrus, we had an agreement!
     They’d been in the mist for weeks, and right from the beginning there’d been no shortage of the dead and dying all around them while they grew lean with hunger. Back in the Sunless Jungle, there had never been any real need to distinguish between ‘food’ and ‘not-food’ when it came to other hooved; there’d always been other options, and he’d never really had to think about whether being a meat-eating predator meant that he drew the line at eating his own kind. Here, suddenly faced with the specter of starvation, he’d thought long and hard about it and come to the conclusion that he’d rather eat than let two bodies rot into the ground instead of one…
     …but at the same time, he was very much trapped here in the mist with others who didn’t eat meat and probably didn’t see things the same way. While there were still alternatives left to him–like the river and its fat, if relatively tasteless, fish–they had both come to an agreement that eating the fallen was a good way to very quickly wear out what little goodwill they had managed to lay claim to.
     Or at least, he thought they’d agreed.
     We said we wouldn’t eat our own.
     I am a crow,  Cirrus said flatly. They’re not my own. Crows eat corpses. It’s expected.
     You’re a very RECOGNIZABLE crow.
     The bird shrugged emphatically, and Wanderer bared his teeth.
     We’re more than capable of hunting for our food. Don’t make problems, bird.
     Fine. Flipping his tail nonchalantly, the crow hopped off of his rock and darted close to steal another scrap of skin before taking flight and vanishing into the mists once more. Also, there’s someone watching you.
     What?! Wanderer snapped his head up, eyes narrowed and ears pricked for any sound. The shore he was standing on was still empty sand and rocks, surrounded by nothing but swirling gray.
     He’s way down here. To your right.
     Fully on edge now, he turned to look along the water’s edge… and sure enough, he could just catch a glimpse of another figure standing there maybe a hundred paces distant. Without Cirrus’s warning he might never have noticed them; they had to be on the very edge of the clear air, visible sporadically in between billows of thicker fog. It was far enough away that he relaxed a little bit. They might be watching–if they could even see him at this distance–or they might just be another sentry along the border of the corrupted mage’s destruction.
     It made him curious, but not curious enough that he wasn’t going to finish the only meal he might have for some time. Wanderer returned to his meal with one wary eye out for any sign of movement downriver, and by the time he had finished stripping the last bits of flesh from bone the figure was gone.

*       *       *

     He’d been ambling along the inner edge of the mist for the better part of the day, and it was hardly the first day he’d spent this way. It had been enough trouble just trying to rouse the sleepers and get them to leave the mist; now, incredibly, some of them were trying to come back in.
     Wanderer hadn’t known about it until overhearing a conversation between a few of the healer-mages, who at this point were exhausted and well past their last reserves of strength. They’d come across more than one unconscious figure on the edges of camp who they knew had been awoken and escorted out into the waiting hands of the ever-vigilant Witchfinders. It hadn’t taken long for him to confirm the rumors for himself; less than an hour later, he’d nearly stumbled across the sleeping form of young ewe–little more than a lamb, really, he’d remembered her because upon waking up all she could talk about is how she had to get home because her parents hadn’t given her permission to attend the Tourney in the first place–who he knew with absolute certainty shouldn’t have been there.
     After seeing proof for himself, the deer had been sure it was some sort of calculated move. He knew full well how ruthless Miriam’s troops were rumored to be; would they draw the line at sending escapees back into the mist to see what happened to them? Was experimentation really beyond them? Yorro certainly hadn’t thought so, and Wanderer had trusted the canny noble’s take on things. But it hadn’t taken long for him to discover that the truth was far stranger.
     The sleepers, it seemed, were returning to the mist of their own accord.
     The first hooved who he’d crossed paths with as they returned to the mist had caught him off guard; Wanderer had confronted them, a tall and scrawny antelope whose gray hide was speckled with softly-glowing stars and who practically radiated power, just as their long-lashed eyes were beginning to droop as the magic overtook them once more.
     You have to stay awake, he’d urged them as they fell to one knee, and he’d shoved out with his own magic until he saw their eyes spring open and the pulse pounding in their neck. Get out of here! Out of the mist!
     I don’t want to, they’d retorted in a voice tight with panic and a strange desperation, it’s all here. Everything I want. Everything I need. Everything is the way it should be in here. This is what I always dreamed of.
     It had made so little sense that he had taken a step back, startled, and in the split second where his own grip on them loosened the antelope had thrown themselves against him hard enough to knock Wanderer to the side. They’d been gone before he knew it, running headlong into the darkness in the direction of Mead.
     He’d found them again, a week later, and this time that already-lanky frame had been wasted and gaunt. Every rib showing. Very, very dead.
     The idea of running eagerly into death repulsed him. Wanderer had always fought to survive, even when he made the sort of questionable choices that left him in situations like this one; it was the law that ruled nature, the rule that underpinned everything and always had. The weak run, the strong fight, the predator hunts and the prey hides. He had always wanted to be on the winning side of that balance, but he’d never willingly flung himself into surrender when he was outmatched.
     Just another thing corrupted.
     Since then, his free time had been spent here on the border so that he could try and turn away anyone else who felt the need to sacrifice themselves to the mist. When they came, he was using his magic for more than a brief jolt to help them stay awake; now he was using it in full, as powerfully as he could without letting his own control slip. He filled the fog’s boundaries with fear, enough fear to make them think twice about the consequences of abandoning themselves to whatever lay inside dreams made of corrupted magic and empty promises. He let the darkness and the shadow and the fact that hooved animals still feared predators work in his favor, and he drove them back out running before him.
     He was not oblivious to the fact that for the watchers outside the mist–the ones he sometimes glimpsed in between billows of fog–he was giving them every reason to think he might be part of the evil that lurked here. But that was a problem he’d have to figure out later.
     In the meantime, his power grew.

*       *       *

     It was the half-light at the end of the day, and it had been raining that afternoon; the transition into night wasn’t all that noticeable, just gloom descending into deeper gloom. Stepping gingerly through what had once been verdant meadow grass and had long since turned into trampled muck, Wanderer paced along a path he’d walked so many times now that he was beginning to wear a game trail into the ground.
     Thankfully, there weren’t as many would-be dreamers at night. He wasn’t sure why–maybe it was easier to act on insane optimism during the sunshine–but he appreciated the respite even if he still walked the border just in case. What else was he going to do? There were gatherings sometimes, small scattered groups of mages who’d kindle fires for companionship among the cold and damp, but he still didn’t quite feel as though he fit in enough for that. He’d joined a time or two when running into Ramman or one of the others who were half-familiar after all these weeks, but… it was still more comfortable out here, wandering by himself in the night.
     Maybe, he thought bitterly, it always would be.
     Doesn’t matter, Cirrus said distantly. It was hard to hear the bird’s voice; he must be pushing the limits of the magical tether that joined them, because the words were almost inaudible. You and I are always pack.
     Yes, yes.
     He might have added more–and while he was at it, made sure that Cirrus wasn’t off scavenging again–if it weren’t for the fact that a dark figure in the mist ahead brought him up short. Wanderer came to an abrupt halt, muscles tensed and alert in case he had to spring away…. But the stranger didn’t move, didn’t even seem to notice his presence just yet.
     They were just barely in the mist; maybe they weren’t in the mist at all, because as he watched warily he noticed that the mist seemed to give the stranger a narrow berth. It was the strangest thing; the fog parted before where they stood as if by the prow of a ship, spiraling out and away like disturbed water. Something in the way it moved was unsettling in a way he couldn’t explain. Curls of vapor spun in odd reversing motion, as though coiled and uncoiled in jerky succession.
     It was magic, obviously, and that made the long-legged horse who stood at its epicenter a mage. Obviously a skilled one too, if they were able to part the corruption-tinged mists like that. Curious, Wanderer took advantage of their concentration to circle quietly around and get a better view. He was still deep enough in the gloom that it hid him well enough, and it meant that he could take the opportunity to observe whatever was going on.
     Unfortunately, as he circled into view of the other hooved’s face, he realized that this was one mage it might be more than worth his while to spy on.
     The horse’s face was easy enough to recognize; a splash of stark white that gave the unsettling look of a skull, giving a bit of dread to otherwise refined features and the pair of ornate golden spectacles that lay across the bridge of his muzzle. He was tall and well-defined, a scholarly collar draped around his neck and hair fussily gathered into a long draping coil punctuated by gold rings binding it into segments.
     He wasn’t the sort of person that was easy to forget the look of.
     He was also a professor at Namarast… and one with an unsettling reputation, according to some of the wild mages who’d pointed him out to Wanderer as the weeks dragged by and they’d spotted him overseeing the impromptu barricades as they went up beyond the mist. A tester of magic… and one who took to his duties with perhaps a little too much enthusiasm.
     Professor Agathias.
     Definitely not someone Wanderer had any interest in being this close to.
     He drew back a step, intending to do nothing more than disappear back into the mists, but that skull-faced head came up abruptly and they locked eyes. Though neither spoke, Wanderer felt the other mage’s gaze rake over him; categorizing, analyzing, somehow stripping him down to a short and dispassionate summary.
     He felt the feathers at the nape of his neck raise in alarm.
     Wanderer?
     Cirrus’s voice was still a long ways off, but his familiar must have sensed his concern.
     I’m alright.
     Slowly, not moving a muscle, he started letting his magic seep into the mist around him. He’d had so much practice in the last few weeks that it felt so much easier now, so much smoother to summon the fear in greater quantities without feeling the effects that came with giving himself over to it. It eddied out through the night air, and though the mists might part around the Order mage his magic didn’t. He could see the way that the horse shifted his weight, subtle muscle movements of someone readying themselves to run if need be. Agathias’s eyes were pale and deepset, but even from this distance he could see the pupils contract, and the way the mist swirled from his breath coming harder.
     He bore the fear well, and if Wanderer hadn’t been watching so carefully he might never have seen the effect it had. But it was his magic, and he was watching carefully.
     And because he was watching carefully, he didn’t miss the way that Agathias’s eyes were flicking from side to side at something in the mist.
     The prospect of an ambush suddenly loomed large, and though he tried to keep his own movements similarly subtle Wanderer quickly cast his own gaze to the side for any sign of lurking enemies… but there was nothing there, only empty darkness. So what was the other mage looking at? An interesting question, but one that now might not be the time to answer.
     Agathias took a careful, measured step backwards towards the open air, and Wanderer took the opportunity to make his own retreat into the darkness. For now, at least, unseen threats meant less than the threat that was right in front of him.
     It took only a few paces back until he felt secure enough to turn and trot quickly in the direction of Mead, feeling the aftereffects of his own adrenaline and shivering in the chill night air. Too close. Far too close; and was every mage in Ivras either in or surrounding this patrons-cursed mist? He’d never have expected the teacher-staff of Namarast here. Yes, he’d seen Agathias before at a distance, but it had been easier to rationalize that as someone passing through or giving aid. He hadn’t expected to come nose to nose in the fog.
     Wanderer? Cirrus swooped in out of the corner of his vision before backwinging his way to a perch atop a pile of staved-in crates. He shook his feathers, settling them more neatly in order before fixing Wanderer with a worried look. What happened?
     A close call with an Order mage.
     In the mist?
     No, not here in the mist. Just beyond it. Without really meaning to, he turned his head to look back the way he’d came. Back towards the edge of the miasma, and the mage it had long since blocked from view. When this is all over, when the mist fades… we may be in trouble.