Lore of Leyuna RPG (FRPG)

[C S]

The recent work on the interior walls and ceiling was fairly noticeable to the two that went inside the building. Not for lack of quality, but age. There was a saturation of color and definition to each brick that replaced those broken by the giant's visit prior to they. The detail warranted a curiosity, however, asking around the lobby produced less than ideal answers. The armored being who they had come to see was not currently at city hall. Before Syria and Septimus could be too disheartened, news of his whereabouts was available.

Desrium was around the city. Just not in it.

The two reunited with Ceridwen outside of city hall much sooner than the small dragoness had expected, with news that they had to get moving mere minutes after arriving.

[The Kingpin]

"Time to go."

"What?" the dragoness all but squawked.

"We're leaving. Come on," stated the Son of Storms.

"But I've just this minute gotten comfortable!" chirped Ceridwen disappointedly.

"And you're just getting uncomfortable. Come on. We don't have all day." The Scholar was firm in his statement.

"Can't I just rest for a few minutes? It took some time making the ground here this comfortable! I had to move the snow and shape it to fit me and everything," Ceridwen grumbled.

Septimus shook his head. "You'll get to do that later. We're heading outside the walls."

"Outside the walls?! So now we have to fly too?" squawked the dragoness.

[C S]

"I thought you'd be overjoyed to know we're going out into the wild," said Syria with a couple of fingers caressing the side of her face in puzzlement. "Wide open space, you can huddle into any spot you wish... no stairs nearby..."

[The Kingpin]

"And lots of things that may want to eat me," added Ceridwen flatly.

"Don't be silly. You and I both know you enjoy the wilderness. More than a highly populated city full of humans of every profession, by any count." The Scholar wasn't putting up with the dragoness's attempts at being difficult, and it showed in his face as well as tone.

It was probably on that basis that the dragoness puffed up, hissed, and then shot vertically into the air, rattling the thinner windows of city hall in the process. Smiling, the Scholar turned to look at Syria. "Works every time."

[C S]

The mage nodded, and absently paid her thanks that Ceridwen had cleared out the snow around her before she took off. At least no one could say they were pelted by the frost by her down draft. Septimus on the other hand...

"I should take some notes for when Beshayir doesn't want to get out of bed," Syria reflected. "Either for that, or when she hugs me and does not let go..."

[The Kingpin]

The Scholar chose to make for the sky first, before responding. And as if reading the mage's thoughts, he did so as the Scholarly Elf, rather than the Scholarly Drake. As such, not much more than a trail of snow and frost as wide as his elvish form could be seen in his wake. Once he was in the air and clear of the snowdrifts below, the dragon made his appearance. It was then that he continued their conversation.

"Ceridwen's best driven to action by incentivising the action. Beshayir's another matter. For her you have to make whatever she's currently doing undesirable enough that she leaves of her own will. Say, make your hands suddenly icy, for the hugs," corrected the Scholar with the insight of one who had been observing his companions' behaviour with fittingly scholarly attention.

[C S]

"An extreme example, but duly noted," Syria responded while she straddled her staff. The icy fingers would solve that particular problem promptly, but in the same way that Syria enjoyed arguing pointlessly with Septimus, she rather enjoyed dealing with Beshayir's shenanigans. Pulling back on the staff to point the blue rose skyward, Syria noted that they all enjoyed being difficult to some degree.

With Ceridwen as the harbinger of their envoy, Syria flew beside Septimus. While the city did not grow small with altitude, it gradually did so with distance, until only its tallest roofs were visible from over the incomplete wall and the thickening forest canopy.

Meanwhile, at their intended destination...


Fallen branches and logs frequented the treeline around the clearing. Among them were whole lengths of trees that included both the branches, the logs and the roots. Their number formed a lattice as impassable as a bramble patch to most. Leaves that had endured the transition from autumn to winter were dead, and piled over the timbers lying atop one another. Irregular wooden spires pointed to the midday sun. They looked like tall stumps, though frayed at the point where the bark was snapped clear of the rest of the stem. These ruined trees stood in a line, culminating in one hardy plant that had its tough exterior blasted apart, exposing the pale layer underneath. And there used to be more of them.

One fractured trunk trembled. At its base stood the metal-skinned being. His metal fingers punctured the raw wood when he grabbed ahold of the remnants of the tree, cracks radiating from each embedded digit. As Desrium exerted more of his strength, the shaking in the ruined tree worsened, and the ground beneath his heavy boots began to break. The soil rose stubbornly, before it began to peel away in a cascade from the surface down into the dirt. From underneath the earth came the roots of tree, inch by inch. Desrium uprooted the tree as one would pick a vegetable from the ground, or a tuber, causing a thin film of dust to rise. The ground underneath the tree gave, pouring into the void left by the root system, while the metal man held the tree over his finned helmet.

The next step in what had become his routine was to turn towards the pile of lumber off to his side and hurl the base of the tree into it while the ground settled and stabilized. And so he did. He brought one foot behind him for balance, turned the tree so that one end was resting over a shoulder, then launched the timber like a javelin. The bulk soared as well as one, up to a point, upon which the natural laws took jurisdiction over the flight and had the tree arcing downwards, rolling and tumbling before crashing down in a heap of twigs and splinters. The crack rang out sharply through the surrounding woods, and the whole process undoubtedly scared off wildlife for miles. It was better than setting fire to the already scorched monuments to battle in order heal the damage dealt, however.

The arena in name only looked unlike the tended to forests around villages, where people cultivated herbs and gathered firewood. There were no convenient paths to be found, even where the ground had been dredged up and cleared of plant life, and the pile of wood would not be claimed and removed. In time the place would look less like a wreck. That time was far from now. Fresh hills of dirt rose from the forest floor, lighter in color than the surroundings, like the repairs done to city hall. The holes kicked, punched and otherwise beaten into the earth had been filled in and smoothed over.

There was a barrel not far from the armored being, smaller than his honey store, and full of seeds he acquired through favor from Brodudika's agriculture. Desrium would need to find seeds and cones out in the area to replant the trees, but a more immediate solution to undoing what his fighting had wrought was to introduce fruits and vegetables that were due to sprout in the spring. This way, the loss of natural habitat would be remedied and there would a source of nourishment for the animals that roamed this way.

As for the fighting... Desrium needed to find some place else that served the purpose of Jiier's former cliff-side home, without being so remote.

Something to contemplate further while uprooting the remaining trees.

[The Kingpin]

The sheer scale of the destruction had the Scholar concerned. It was only when he got close enough that trees no longer obscured his view of the Stalwart that his mind was put at ease. Desrium would no doubt have seen, sensed him long before that, and in light of it, Septimus found no need in announcing himself. Instead he circled around twice, choosing an ideal approach, and landing in the middle of the clearing with a hefty thump that had the more precariously balanced trees tumbling down the pile and settling in the upturned dirt below.

Ceridwen was more graceful in her approach, flitting this way and that like an enormous swallow before swooping in to near ground level, rising upwards slightly, and landing gingerly in the soft soil.

[C S]

Capping off the progression of graceful landings was Syria. The mage swooped into the clearing at a languid speed until she was level with Septimus' shoulder height. Once at her desired altitude, she felt comfortable enough to wave at the watching Paladin. There was something counterintuitive from an innately human standpoint about waving at someone from long distances, even if that someone had the ability to see the gesture at those distances. This resulted in Syria coasting along on her staff towards the Scholar, her torso turned so that she could wave at the armored being behind her.

She faced forward as she drifted along Septimus' side, and leaned over in his direction to have her staff swerve. It passed over the dragon's back, and Syria dismounted onto him, standing where she and Desrium would normally sit. Syria then adjusted her footing to peep out from behind Septimus' dorsal fin, using her staff as support.

Desrium, standing near the hardy tree that he launched himself off of, dedicated the moment to appreciating his visitors' individual styles. "Greetings," he said to them, though he knew Syria would have trouble hearing him. To compensate, he waved a gauntlet, and his sentiment was made clear.

[The Kingpin]

"Greetings, Desrium," rumbled the Son of Storms with a smile as his wings furled, exposing the earth below them to the light once more. "I see you have been...redecorating," he noted, glancing pointedly to the stacks of scorched trees.

[C S]

"Is it me, or is there still a hint of woodsmoke around here?" Syria joked to Septimus, even as she wondered what manner of disturbance, as Viho and the people at city hall had put it, could have resulted in all they were seeing. As far as she knew, Desrium wasn't capable of causing anything that could char a swath of trees... or did she not ask the right questions up until now?

Desrium angled his helm towards the burnt and broken, loosely stacked trees. Something crossed his mind at Septimus' words that he hadn't considered until that moment; more accurately, the irony of those words.

The irony, and the Scholar's presence in the desolation, invoked Desrium's first memories of the land across the Jade. Petrified husks, days closer to crumbling to dust and blowing across arid wastes at best. Tainted swamps belching miasma and bleeding from the bark at worst. These were the qualities of Tyrbenetus' woodlands. The grounds where they were gathered had been visited by one who called that land home, for the brief time before it was beset by flame. With his brother in spirit and battle present, Desrium felt an even stronger connection to the land of the Justicars.

"The power to decorate this place is out of my hands," Desrium replied, though in his musings, his words resonated far past this one clearing. "Time and nature's grace will make it beautiful again." Just as one day soon, lively green would return to these stretches, Tyrbenetus would grow lush. Life would return to its wide open spaces, heights and depths in time.

"I am only... laying the groundwork, as they say." Ridding a land of demons. Clearing debris and dead trees. All the same, in this sense.

[The Kingpin]

"In more ways than one, as it turns out," commented the Scholar reassuringly. "The rock that was once molten feeds the forest that one day grows from it. The ashes of fallen trees feed the generation that succeeds them," he explained as he closed the gap between himself and the Stalwart. "It is why dragons are sometimes depicted as life and death incarnate. Just as we are known to destroy, we are known to bring life to that which is dead."

Ceridwen's gaze remained fixed on the Scholar, pondering the validity of his title now that she heard the results of his scholarly pursuits. Was this why the Draxons worshipped a dragon?

[C S]

Desrium's response was the maxim he and his comrade were well versed in. It was not something that gave the dragoness any closure with her quandary, however. "Balance in all things", leaving Ceridwen with another snippet of wisdom to endure the rigors of her criticism. Likewise, Syria absorbed what she heard for the intrigue of the topic, while a part of her explored the consequences of Septimus adding gardening to his extensive list of dabbling fields. A Scholarly Elf standing in a plot turned to ash after a harvest...

"Puts a new 'light' on your flower conjuring," Syria commented to no one in particular.

[The Kingpin]

That earned her a chuckle from the Scholar. " I suppose it does," he rumbled as his eyes shone slightly brighter, a flower bursting into existence in the Mage's hat. "I never really thought about it that way. It started off as just another breach of expectation. People expect the dragon to tear his meals to shreds, I cook mine over a fire and eat them on a plate. They expect me to pillage castles for their hoards, I visit libraries and collect knowledge. They expect me to burn cities to ash, I plague them with flowers," he explained with a shrug of a shoulder, shooting a lopsided smirk at the surprised looking dragoness to his side.

It was, indeed, something that had taken Ceridwen aback. Since leaving Drakhunmiir, she had resigned herself to the fate of always being seen as a beast, a threat to all of man, elf and dwarf-kind. Something everyone feared, and which was inevitably going to endanger them. Not once had she considered actively contradicting those beliefs. Perhaps the Scholar wasn't such a fool of a drake after all.

[C S]

Desrium could very much relate, being fate's reflection of the night-scaled Scholar. He did not feel it tactful to state examples as Septimus had. It would only upset the dragon, rather than illustrate a point that they both went on regardless of their obstacles. Many things were coinciding in circumstance lately, and Desrium would rather not incite Septimus' drive to defend him, now of all times. The dragon and mage had done enough putting their lives in danger seeking Morrelie.

Instead, he stated with all the tact that could be expected from him, "Buruq." The name was enough to continue Septimus' thought.

[The Kingpin]

Septimus nodded in response to that. "Buruq is another fine example," he rumbled. "But now I am allowing myself to be drawn off on a tangent. Our reasons here aren't to hear me talk. I'm sure everyone gets enough of that on average as it is," he added, laughing at his own drift towards Buruq-ish rambling. The Ambassador had left more of a mark on him than he thought.

[C S]

Desrium nodded as well. Not for express agreement with the Scholar; their time together was an unavoidable sacrifice, and a hefty price to pay for Brodudika. His was a less obvious tangent, but a tangent nonetheless. It was time to bring his attention back to the here and now. At the very least, the here and things that transpired weeks ago. He had an overdue debt of gratitude to express, and some developments that were related to that debt to share with his company. Developments overdue in their own way.

"I have something to show you."

Those words were all he prefaced the emergence of his shadowy tapestry. A smokey cloud washed heavily down the Stalwart's height from his shoulders, spilled across the soil and left of the fabric of void to ruffle in the winter breeze. The wings of light Septimus had known had become something more fitting for a Djinn, and more solid... almost like the lost robe.

[The Kingpin]

The Scholar's eyes widened with a few measured degrees of surprise. "I see you've been doing much more than redecorating since we last spoke. What is this?" he asked, though he already had a rough idea, seeing as the aura he gave off now seemed to emanate from the Stalwart's weapon as well.

[C S]

"That which is partly responsible for the destruction you see here," Desrium answered.

"Only partly?" asked the bewildered mage on the dragon's back. "... Dare I ask, what the other part is?"

"Parts." That made Syria visibly cringe, clutching her staff closer to her body as if to brace for even more devastating news, more literal than metaphorical. "Much of the residue of ash you see around you is a result of Evisa's light. She has elemental power, though she is of human birth."

"As we've heard..." the mage replied with a sense of resignation.

[The Kingpin]

Ceridwen blinked at that. Taken by surprise first by the shift in the armoured...thing's appearance, and then by the implication that much of the destruction was the handiwork of that friendly woman she had met in the academy. To think she had that much power behind her... It was something that earned Evisa some newfound respect in the dragoness's eyes.

"And the other parts?" asked the Scholar, having heard nothing that had surprised him thusfar.