Fable - Ask Horizons

[Maranae]

The sun was already settling toward the western horizon, the light a golden syrup that poured across the world and cast long shadows that danced with the soft southerly wind, blowing in the scents of the savannah farther to the south. great lumbering beasts, native to these grasslands, plodded along unconcernedly across the flat lands, heading for the slow, silt-laden waters of the Cairou river of which that golden sun gleamed off of as it wended its way across the northern extremity of the plains, and those sparkling lights reflected into a cloudless sky that was already beginning to go orange and red, fading to purple. The delta was a beautiful place this time of day, and of a morning as well.

An idyllic place to sit and stare across the world as the night marched onwards. Pneria rising slowly in the east as the sun dipped low in the west. Only the sound of the wind, the lapping of the water, and the lowing of the great herbivores treading across the grasslands.

The moment was shattered in an instant at the feral cry of some cat, the sudden thunder of hooves startled into panicked flight, and the low roar of a stampede as the small herd took wing and fled.

***

Feline eyes blinked in the light of the sun, blinked from the golden, slitted irises of a cat to the jade-green of a human, and back again. Their owner crouched low in the grass, moving forward on all fours like some kind of an animal, silent as a ghost. Maybe it was an animal, but it certainly did not look like one.

Maranae licked her chops, ignorant of the saliva spilling across her lips and dripping from her chin. She was hungry, and when she was hungry she was single-minded in the pursuit of the next meal. Her middle felt as though it had been hollowed out with a knife, and that knife stabbed at her every time she moved. She could ignore it - had to ignore it - but it did not make her happy to do so.

The beast she was stalking was at least ten times her size. It had sighted her, but as the wind was blowing the wrong way for it to scent her, it had merely assumed she was not a threat, casually flicking a floppy ear at her (or perhaps some flies) before stepping forward a bit more, bending its great neck to tear up more grass. The thing had great horns on its head that probably weighed about half of what she did, curling things that jutted from above the eyes and curled round on themselves.

On second thought, there probably wasn't much it was concerned about from an apparently human girl. A spear would only make it angry, and a bow would not penetrate a hide so thick easily enough to drop it in one shot.

The girl was a tall one, though, abnormally so. That willowy frame looked like it was as fragile as spun glass, red hair flowing in a tangled, knotted mess down her back to just short of her rump. Her eyes were not the only disconcerting thing about her. Intent as she was on her prey, following its every movement like the predator she was, it was easy to see the tips of long incisors jutting from beneath her upper lip except they were not always there, no more than the claws on her feet or hands were. Viewed from afar, it would be hard to see, but up close it seemed like she shifted wildly between one form and another, neither of which were too dissimilar from one another.

Crouching in the grass, she gave the distinct impression of a tail switching behind her, although there was none present.

Suddenly, like a striking viper, she was up on two legs and running, a feral cry ringing from her mouth that sounded inhuman. The beast, startled at the sight of the slight woman running at him, backed a step and slowly swung its massive head around. The woman was impossibly fast, though; she covered the fifty meters between them in seconds. There was a split moment before the beast bellowed in pain as she leapt the last five meters and landed on its head, claws shredding the hide.

The beast wasn't going to have anything to do with this. Twelve hundred pounds of muscle and bone turned and bolted. It tried to shake the infuriating thing off its its head, but Maranae clung to it like a limpet, crawling down the neck before reaching down to sever the carotid artery in a spray of blood before digging in with her claws.

If anything, this infuriated the beast even more. Mortally wounded, it nevertheless went insane, bucking and tossing its head to shake loose the biting, slicing dervish on its back. Maranae did not stop tearing at it, trying to inflict as much damage as possible, until it finally managed to shake her off. She sailed through the air and landed maladroitly in the grass as the thing, enraged, rounded on her and charged. Wounded, dying, its breathing labored already as its life flowed out in great fountains, it was nevertheless still a mountain of muscle with an incredible amount of weight behind it. Maranae was only just getting back to her feet, turning to face the beast with blood of her own running from her hands and a gash across her face, when the thing hit her like an avalanche, tossing her into the air like a rag doll. The force of the blow should have shattered bone, but it did not. Instead, she hit the ground, blood pouring from another gash in her scalp and from a torn bit of flesh on her forearm.

The thing turned, listlessly, and charged again. The girl spit blood, and at the last second leapt so that she landed on the things head again.

And then she punched it in the face, one heavy blow after another. The beast staggered after the first inhumanly strong blow, dropped to its knees, but by the third or fourth blow it was down, shaking its head weakly. Finally, something broke on the sixth blow and it gave one last, shuddering breath before collapsing. Muscles twitched their final movements as the strange woman picked herself up off the cracked skull of the plains beast, trembling a little as she did. She looked at the thing with wide, unblinking eyes, breathing easing as she did...

...and then leapt into the air, one fist raised high. "Mara did it! She did it!" She did a little caper and skipped round the big beast, chortling and making happy little noises to herself.

***

The sun had failed to move much by the time she began her work. With the tail clutched tightly with both hands, she was tugging mightily, struggling to drag the thing down towards the river. The sky overhead had not gone to purple yet, but it would not be long.

It was comical, watching her - weighing at most a hundred twenty pounds - trying to drag something that was easily ten times that. And yet...and yet, somehow she was managing it. Each mighty pull, clawed feet scrabbling at the hard ground, yielded a foot or two. Sweat gleamed on her pale, freckled face, but aside from a certain glow gained from the exertion, she seemed otherwise unbothered by the task. She should have torn muscles doing what she was doing, and yet she did not. In fact, the wounds she had received during her barehand brawl with the beast had already mostly healed, leaving not even scars behind.

There was no need to drag it to the water, but the memory of someone from before whispered to her. The ragged clothing she wore had been gained from that person, and she tried to take care of it. Meal time was a messy affair, so when water was available she tried to sluice herself down afterwards. There was no way she could eat the whole beast behind her, but it wouldn't stop her from trying.

Grunting, hauling on her prize, she stopped to listen as the coyotes out in the grasslands raised their heads to greet the coming of night, snorted, and put her back back into the work.

 

[Tess]

She had been to the savannah three times in her life, though if she were to admit she only remembered two of the trips. Her first time through had been the result of being captured by giant eagles and carried, more or less unconsciously, halfway across the continent after successfully miscalculating a spell. Instead of heating her tea five times faster than the basic, more mundane spell, she'd instead blown herself, and her tea, sky high while she camped on the outskirts of the Falwood. The resulting air time, as she called it afterwards, landed her into an eagle nest relatively nearby with several broken bones and a severe concussion sans eyebrows. Why the eagles had decided to carry her so far north was beyond her comprehension, but if one had been able to ask the eagles in question they'd probably have muttered something about not wanting to live within a day's flight, much less eat, a potential human bomb.

The second trip had been what was technically the other half of the first trip where she attempted to both find where she'd wound up and then wander to somewhere she actually recognized, which was a story of its own.

This time, she'd travelled into the region to find more of the exotic and rarer specimens of herbs and flowers for her future experiments as alchemical components and reagents. She'd struck out along the Cairou River figuring that would be the best place to find the highly unstable, extremely caustic, yet oddly edible Stoneroot plant. The tuber supposedly grew only along the Cairou river and, even then, only rarely. Tess knew how to find the plant by both visually identifying the bright purple stalk with its fleshy leaves that left massive, skin searing burns on touch as well as magically identifying it by the odd gravitic pull on her enchanted dowsing rods.

The issue was that the dowsing rods were, at this point, not wanting to function. Half the time they tried to point her into the river while the rest of the time they simply sat in her hands idle and humming quietly. She made a mental note to have a quiet word with the tiny spirit she'd coaxed into the metal and wood contraption about paying more attention, but continued on along the riverbank while paying no mind that, to anyone observing, the small, slight woman happily plodding along in dark robes, satchel bag at her hip, and a wide brimmed, pointed hat stood out like an orc at a tea party on the savannah.

With the sun slowly threatening to descend and Tess remembering all four occasions in the past two days where darkness had fallen right before hungry and excessively annoyed predators of various sizes had attempted to kill, maim, eat, and - worse - disrupt her search, she decided it was probably a good idea to find a campsite that deterred said carnivorous guests.

The problem was, however, she had no idea how to survive in the wilderness of the savannah. This problem gave way to an equally pressing problem: where to pitch camp in said wilderness she had no idea how to survive in.

With the sobering thought in her head counterweighted by borderline-suicidal optimism, she began searching for a suitable flat area to bed down and attempt not to die for the night.

Maranae

 

[Maranae]

Where is the next village at?

The thought flitted through her mind absently as she went about her work. Her back was already aching from the exertion of dragging dinner a quarter of a mile from where she had killed it. She had not eviscerated the thing yet, which was just as well; the blood on her from her own wounds, which had long since healed entirely, was bad enough without adding bile and vitriol to the mix.

The scent of the water made her redouble her efforts, though. She was so close, and within a few more minutes she was actually standing on the shore, the slowly bloating corpse behind her rolling to a rest at the water's edge. She had made enough noise to wake the dead in her efforts to drag the damned beast this far, between her grunts of effort and the crunch of grass and undergrowth. The noise had hidden the sound of anything else around her, too, but Maranae had never been concerned about other predators. Generally, when they caught the first whiff of her scent, they were hell-bent to be anywhere but there. The chimera was an unnatural creature, after all, crafted through a blending of sorcery and animals, all welded via magic to a human template.

She was no more human than a wolf was, but at least a wolf was still a thing of the natural order. She existed outside the natural order, an abomination with little to rival the darkness used to create her. Just as well she did not ever consider the moral implications of what she was, not that she considered anything at all about what she was.

Oblivious to the young woman nearby, Maranae dropped the tail and stood, panting a moment, before jumping into the relatively cool water to sluice off the sweat and blood from her hunt. That, and to make it easier when the work got messy, as it was about to, to clean up afterwards.

 

[Tess]

She wandered to and fro searching for a campsite while still holding her unmotivated dowsing rods. Occasionally, the rods came close to crossing and, at one point, almost crossed entirely. The things were attuned to magic and the tiny spirit inside would only alert when more or less very close by anything with a magical aura, enchantment, or spell, both active and passive.

Tess was completely enthralled in her task as she meandered closer and closer to the strange woman. She never noticed the large, very dead, very smelly creature laying like a miniature meat mountain next to the river. She also never noticed the woman, her strangeness, or even the river, if truth be told. The little mage's whole focus was on the slowly crossing dowsing rods in her hands, her awareness entirely shut off from anything and everything else around her which was usually what happened when magical goings on went on around her.

She never realized she was at the river's edge as she slowly marched forward, the rods ever so slowly getting closer to touching. She also didn't realize that the river's edge was a relatively steep, if short, drop rather than the shallow shoreline she was used to. Tess lastly didn't spot the woman in said river, nor smell the blood, or even register odd splashing or other such sounds.

What she did realize, however, was that the rods connected as she hit the water having successfully falling into the river more or less as she drew even with the strange woman. The cold water hit Tess' senses like the stone rhino did during her second trip through - or rather out of - the savannah, albeit with less concussive force and the lack of both trampling and the odd puncture wound. She floundered in the water as she struggled to find the river bank with her feet. Her priorities were simple: Don't drop the dowsing rods first, get to shore second. All else, including whatever her booted foot connected with, was an afterthought at best.

Maranae

 

[Maranae]

Water was not a particularly enjoyable thing to the young chimera, who felt on some base level that water was for drinking and that was essentially that. Vague memories floated through her mind of a time when it was not so, but the when and the where, like so much from that period, were as ephemeral as the passing clouds in the sky. In any case, the silty water performed the job that it was supposed to, and the creature broke surface muddy water painted sunset orange and violet and red...

...only to be struck by something hard in the face. As quickly as she had come up to the surface, she went back down again. The bottom was soft and muddy here, to the benefit of the young lady that was discovering what it felt like to be wet; for Mara, it did not work out so well. Had she been properly planted, she might have been knee-deep in muck on the bottom, but as it was she slipped right off that bottom and landed in the water with a muffled, wet squeal.

At absolute best, she was half human. Truthfully, there was more animal in Maranae than there was human, and so the instinctive side of her mind was quite strong. Despite her creator's best efforts, they did not get the malleable predator they were looking for, the fearless killing machine. Some integral part of the spirit of the little girl they had used as a part of their experiment refused to bow to the wild instincts of the things they had blended her with.

When the redhead came back to the surface, sputtering and coughing up the river water she had inadvertently inhaled when she took her second, unintended plunge, it was with wide eyes. She had ended up further out in the river, but it did not seem to matter; she practically ran across the surface of the water, or at least gave a very good impression of doing it. She could not see what had hit her, not at first, and made a bee-line for the bank. Hands that moments before had been tipped with finger nails were instead sharp, feline claws and her half open mouth sported the fangs of a predator.

She was up the bank in a heartbeat, still coughing as she went. Once above the water, she flopped to the ground, coughing up more muddy water...and then stopped, as the remarkable regenerative abilities she possessed went to work. She felt the weight of those effects quite keenly, piled upon the other injustices she had been subject to that day.

To flee, or to stay? The animal part of her demanded an answer to that question, and it was quite insistent. But...but there was another part to her. Inquisitive and curious, more in line with the little girl she should have been than the monster she was.

Against what would be her better judgement, if she had any such thing, she crept back to the edge of the bank, unruly mop of red hair slowly rising above the horizon. Her green human eyes/yellow feline eyes (which were they? first one then the other without rhyme or reason) poked above the edge, looking to see what had drawn the blood that dripped from her lip.

 

[Tess]

Muddy river water was a unique taste, though one not unknown to Tess. It wasn't her first silt-water-river-rodeo, especially a rodeo she unintentionally joined, but it was definitely a first when it came to falling in with expensive and valuable dowsing rods in hand.

Mud and water mixed to make an opaque world through which she couldn't even see her nose in front of her face. Fortunately, she managed to keep the rods in her hands. Unfortunately, water and robes made swimming awkward and difficult at best. She managed to lever her legs underneath her body, or at least she thought it was underneath, and was rewarded with more or less solid-ish earth below her boots. Shoving hard, she pushed herself where she thought up was and was relieved when she broke the surface. The plus side was she'd landed in the shallow end of things. The downside was she was now soaked and muddy.

Tucking the dowsing rods carefully into her bag, the enchantments keeping the contents inside perfectly dry even if the leather and canvas was waterlogged, Tess used one of her now free hands to push the front brim of her waterlogged hat up so she could see. She carefully waded back to the relatively dry shore and proceeded to quietly swear and curse under her breath at whoever thought putting a river in the middle of nowhere was a good idea.

Her hat hit the dry part of the river bank followed by her outer robes and her boots. Her bodice, breeches, and the rest was surprisingly dry, courtesy of the experimental spell she'd thrown on the things a while back. It had been a temperamental thing and the result was clothes that, usually, were waterproof, though occasionally they maintained more lightly damp environs than she'd care for.

The heavy, wet, and quickly becoming cold clothes set aside, she sat down and began rummaging through her bag, words of power muttered quickly under her breath. The current situation demanding her attention, Tess was entirely oblivious to anything around her, only pausing periodically to push wet hair from her eyes as she dug around elbow deep in her bag.

Maranae

 

[Maranae]

Most of her short life had been spent alternatively looking for something she could not describe or running away from people that really, really wanted her to come along with them. The problem with the latter was it didn't seem to matter to them if she did it in one piece or if it was as a meat puzzle. Such attention should have driven someone to be a little bitter or perhaps skittish in the presence of people they did not know, but that was simply not the case with the chimera. It seemed to be an innate trait, her inquisitive nature; either through some aspect of one of the creatures she had been created from or, possibly, due to a lack of intelligence on her part (it was hard to say, and none could have as she was a unique creature as were all chimera), she seemed to be curious about almost every part of the world around her.

Better sense would have had her slip away into the growing gloom. She did not do that, of course; with a glance over her shoulder to make sure that dinner hadn't gone anywhere, she turned to look at the strange human in front of her. She delicately sniffed at the air, scenting her, and caught the faint whiff of magic and a more feminine scent buried beneath the river water and arcane waftings.

Mara did not understand magic at all. Most of her experience with it had been negative - to put it mildly - but it seemed those things that defied her ability to understand were the ones that drew her like a moth to an open flame.

Moving with the stealth only a predator of the very plains they were on could achieve, she slipped through the tall grass in near silence. She wanted to see what the woman was doing. There wasn't any real thought about the fact that she could be yet another bounty hunter out for the coin on her head, or a predator in her own right. She had never really suffered any real consequence for her inquisitiveness in her short life - nto any that lasted beyond a day or two, anyway - and so held surprisingly little fear until the pain came.

 

[Tess]

It took a minute or two of rummaging, but she'd finally found what she was looking for. Or, rather, one of the two things she was looking for.

She pulled what looked like a lump of opaque, amber crystal from her bag and set it on the ground beside her. She then muttered another word or two and swapped to the provisions side of the bag. A moment or two more of digging around produced a square shaped bottle made of dark glass complete with cork which joined the crystal on the ground. Satisfied, she closed up the bag and set it aside before pulling her soaked clothes closer and stretching them out nicely.

Tess took the crystal in one hand and held her other hand over it, her fingers precisely cocked with her index finger ramrod straight. She quietly whispered two words in a language she didn't even understand, truth be told, and gently blew on the surface of the amber rock. Deep within came a small flicker of a glow and the crystal slowly began to warm up until it was just barely able to be held in her hands. She took the rock and placed it on the ground in the middle of her clothes and gestured, speaking another word of power, this time in a language she understood entirely. A few more words strengthened the magic and wove a temporary enchantment over the rock and her clothes. It was a simple enough spell, or rather three spells. One to summon an air current around the rock, one to direct the air through the clothes, and another to recycle the air back to the crystal. The trick was one she'd learned ages ago the first dozen times she'd fallen in a river and the spells had served her well enough, provided she kept things like open flames and flammable gasses away from the enchantments. She did still miss her first hat sometimes, but the lessons learned were move valuable in the end.

Her clothes now drying, she figured here would be as good a spot for camp as any. A few moments to gather tinder and wood passed like smoke in the wind and, coupled with a few summoned sparks, the effort produced a basic fire. Content with her work so far and hoping that, for once, animals in the area wouldn't try to eat her again, she popped the cork on the bottle she'd pulled out earlier and took a deep swig. The magic warmed and dried her clothes, the fire kept the animals at bay (hopefully), and the aged wine she'd nicked from a shop a year or two before would warm her from the inside out. The downside was there wasn't any food, but she figured all things considered at least she, herself, wasn't food.

At least, not yet, and the wine helped direct her mind away from darker thoughts and on to more important ones.

For example, why did the dowsing rods dump her into the river at the last second?

Maranae

 

[Maranae]

She watched from a vantage point that was surprisingly close to hand. The tall grass along the banks provided adequate cover, and she seemed to have a knack for not being seen when she did not want to in any case. The dusk breeze picked up as the sun finally disappeared in its entirety behind the distant horizon, the quality of the late fading into deep oranges and reds. The light was not an issue for her, though; she could see as clearly in darkness as in daylight. The breeze rustled the grasses all along the bank.

Mara watched intently as the human did things. The use of magic made the hairs along the nape of her neck stand on edge - an involuntary reaction, perhaps to some forgotten memory of the not-so-distant past. Blood still dripped from her chin, leaking from her nose where the woman had inadvertently kicked her on her way down into the water. It did not hurt - broken bones seldom elicited much reaction for her, and a bloodied nose was less serious than the scrapes on hands and feet from running across the world barefoot - and in truth, had been forgotten. It would be healed before she went to sleep tonight, in any case.

She wrinkled her nose at the scent of the wine - it smelled like nothing less than rotted fruit - as soon as the cork was popped. She made no move to get any closer, though, just watched. That was all she really intended to do, was to see what this one was up to, and slip back to the carcass not a hundred yards further on down the bank.

That plan would have worked splendidly had the wind not shifted, carrying the smoke towards the concealed chimera instead of away from it. The scent was strong and did not agree with her delicate nose at all, and a quick series of sneezes brought on by it blew her cover - a scant twenty feet away from the witch - in a hurry. Almost as though by magic, the act of breaking her silence made her quite visible, overlarge green eyes oddly reflecting the campfire light back as though she were some dog or cat.

 

[Tess]

A series of sneezes yanked Tess' attention away from watching the fire while sipping wine and dumped her back into reality with a heady rush of adrenaline. Years of living in the wild with animals, people, ghosts, weather, and the occasional monster had left her nerves somewhat high strung when it came to odd noises in the dark. The wine was, thankfully, sitting on the ground and so it was spared a sudden drop and a quick, shattering stop as the young mage snapped up to her feet with reflexes borne of scores of not-quite-dead-yet experiences.

One hand snapped up, the word of power on her lips before she could truly think, whipping a magical shield up and around her with a faint hum reminiscent of mildly annoyed honeybees. The other snatched what looked to be a small marble off her belt and flicked it in the general direction of the noises. Tess was festooned in baubles and bits, trinkets and gewgaws, some of which were mundane and made her happy with how they looked on her clothes. Others, like the marble, were more utilitarian.

The enchantments ranged from a few feathers that lit and burned for hours to a spiral seashell that went up in a cloud of acrid smoke. She even had a tiny bell that, when the proper word of power was spoken, would shatter windows and ear drums for dozens of feet around. The marble was an old, tried and true magical doodad and one of the first spells she'd mastered and contained in an item. It took only a spark of magic, literally and figuratively, which made it ideal for situations that restricted verbal spell components or situations like this where the initial word of power was to launch protective magic.

The marble flew through the air a dozen feet before detonating. Most expected a flash of light, others expected a ball of fire. Once, she was told by another mage that they'd expected ball lightning or a concussive blast, perhaps even a burst of thunder to stun a would-be assailant. Instead, the marble exploded into a sheet of glowing, viscous, and glue-like purple goop and covered more or less the entire nearby area of river grass in its snot-like embrace.

Hoping she'd nailed whatever it was with her marble, the working title of which was 'Tess's Mucus Marble™', she pulled a second trinket from her belt and waited a moment, expecting something to go awry.

Again.

Maranae

 

[Maranae]

The tingle of magic was the only warning Maranae had. Had it been someone else, there might have been a moment of alarm, a thrill of concern at whatever spell had been unleashed by the woman with her hat sitting next to the fire.

From Mara, there was, after a couple more sneezes, a head-cocked look that any dog owner would have been familiar with just before the main event. She didn't make any attempt to run, or even to defend herself in any way. She had, of course, seen the item thrown her way...but it was so small, she could not see it being harmful.

Instead, there was a girly squeal, suddenly cut off.

Mara went down almost immediately as the stuff struck her, getting in her eyes and sealing her mouth and nose nearly instantly. The fact that she could not breath was of little concern to her; everywhere the purple slime touched, it burned. It burned like hell itself, and whatever it was supposed to do did not seem to matter. Steam and perhaps smoke rolled off of it where it touched her flesh directly, and just steam where it was on her clothes.

It seemed to flake away with her movements as she thrashed, the glue-like properties picking up bits of soils and grass until the stuff flaked away, no longer purple but grey and inert.

"Burns! It burns it burns it burns," she shrieked as it fell away from her face. Her skin had turned a vivid red wherever that goo had landed. "Burns! Make it stop, make it stop burning Mara!" With another shriek, clawing at her face until blood ran down her cheeks in thin rivulets, the girl scrambled and dove for the river, seeking to get the offending substance off of her even as the magic within it was sapped dry.

She hit the water like a wrecking ball, and stayed under for a long minute, followed by another. About the point one would question whether she had drowned or not, then her head popped up above the surface. She was out of reach of the woman that had thrown...whatever that burning stuff was at her. Logically, she should have fled, but instead she remained where she was, a shadowy, disembodied head floating in the water. So far from the fire, it was difficult to see the damage that the girl had done to her face in trying to claw the purple stuff off, or the angry red skin.

 

[Tess]

The shield fizzled out with a pop and Tess stood quietly, more or less frozen in place. She'd expected a predator, or perhaps a handful of opportunistic bandits. What she didn't expect was a small, slight figure stalking her. What she also didn't expect was said figure's reaction to her enchanted marble.

The spell wasn't designed to do much more than summon goop that entangled, glued, and generally clung to anything and everything. It was her nonlethal approach to stopping would-be assailants and thugs and, perhaps, incapacitate those she'd borrow items from on occasion. She'd never seen a reaction anywhere close to painful on contact with the goop. She'd seen a few puke from the taste or smell (she'd taste tested the goop once and could at least fully sympathize with those she caught with their mouths open), but no one had ever been truly hurt by the spell.

She watched whoever it was she'd caught with the spell - a girl if the cut off scream was anything to go by - and watched in stunned silence as the person dove into the water. After a time, she saw a head pop up in the water and she could only assume the person was staring at her in the dark. Tess lowered her hands and was quiet a time as she and whoever was in the water stared at each other for a moment. Either her marble was mis-enchanted or whoever was stalking her was far from normal.

"Uh..." she said to the girl in the water, or at least she assumed it was a girl for the aforementioned reasons. It was an awkward situation regardless of how she handled it, so the young mage decided even her most awkward self could hardly cause any more damage to the immediate situation than she already had.

"... Are you okay?... That spell isn't supposed to... Well... Burn."

Maranae

 

[Maranae]

None of the offending slime remained. It had all dried, its magic wrested away from it so savagely that it actually burned the girl it was on. Once bereft of the vestment of the spell, it simply flaked away like ashes - or would have, had not the river swept it away from her.

Something beat at the back of her head, tagged at her like it wanted her attention. Maranae had the sneaking suspicion that it was her own mind trying to advise her against a course of action - though of course, the concept wasn't quite as sophisticated as that. The gist of it was there, though. The voice of reason was tellign her that it would be best to not be here anymore.

Maranae ignored it like she always did. The memory of pain was always fleeting and seldom held much value as a deterrent to her. The bleeding gouges in her face, one of which sliced through her cheek into her mouth, barely even registered. Even as she sat there in the dirty water, the wounds were slowly mending themselves.

"Spell?" The single word rang out too loud across the water; it was the one word the girl latched onto. She tasted it in her mouth - it tasted salty, or perhaps that was just the blood. She blinked blood and water from her eyes, and tried to cast back in her mind. Spell...spell...

Magic?

Someone smarter or better versed in the world would have stayed out of reach; Maranae did not. Instead, she moved in closer to shore to get a better look at the woman that had burned her. Curiosity would forever be her undoing, it seemed. "Burn like fire, all over," she said suddenly. "Why did the lady burn me? I do not like it, no, Mara doesn't!"

Luminous eyes in the firelight, staring back at her.

 

[Tess]

Tess blinked, her mind doing somersaults in her skull as she tried to understand the magical laws and rules that had just been broken, or at least severely bent out of shape.

"Uh, I didn't mean to," she said after a moment, her brow furrowing as her thoughts raced. An explanation eluded her, but that didn't mean she wouldn't eventually figure it out. Or, maybe she wouldn't, but it was the intent that mattered and she intended to try and figure out what just happened.

"That enchantment was just.. Well, goop. A glue trap, really. It wasn't meant to burn, just to keep things from attacking or moving. I don't usually burn things if I can help it. Fire magic and I don't get along. Usually."

She ignored the sudden flashback of three shops, two taverns, a city block, and yesterday's dinner going up in flames and focused on the task at hand. Whoever this girl was, she probably didn't need to know about Tess's adventures into pyromancy. Or, rather, her misadventures.

"I have some poultices if you're hurt? So long as you're not gonna try and kill me or anything. Bandages, too."

Tess couldn't place the girl's age by looks, she could barely see the stranger in the gloom, but her voice spoke of youth, or at least diminutive size. She knew her own size wasn't exactly on the average end of normal, but whoever she'd hit with her enchanted marble sounded younger, or at least smaller, and since she hadn't run off or charged with dangerous intent, the least the young mage felt she could do was tend to any burns from what appeared to a magical mystery.

Maranae

 

[Maranae]

The woman spoke quickly, and there were many words that she said that the chimera did not really understand. Her education was spotty at absolute best, after all. She had been trained to be a weapon, and there were a variety of skills a weapon of dubious intelligence had no use for.

Carrying on intelligent conversation was certainly among that list.

"Don't like fire," Maranae said in agreement, once again too loud. There was no reason for her, in her mind at least, to try and hide from something that was already aware of her presence. She moved slowly towards the shore, eyeing Tess carefully. The closer she came to the fire, the more illumination there was and the easier it was to see her clearly. By the flickering light, it was possible to see the angry red burns from where the goop touched her. It was also easy - and unpleasant to see - the gouges in her face and the burns there, too. The injuries looked like they had been done a day ago, now; they were not healed, but clearly were going to. In fact, if one watched closely...

It was difficult to tell the chimera's age. She had the body of a human child just entering her flowering. It was readily apparent that she had a lot more growing to do, but it was also clear she had done a lot of growing recently, too. The boyishly slim frame had a willowy quality to it that absolutely hid the strength within.

"What are...those things? Polt...isis?" She stopped when the water was to her knees, the ragged trousers and shirt clinging to her frame in what would have been revealing if there was anything to reveal. "Mara does not hurt," she said. There was pain, but for her it was insignificant; she had taken spears to the chest and worse. She was still alive, because it was damnably hard to do permanent hurt to her. Pain, as it was, was only felt when she was healing from those greater wounds. Blessedly, like childbirth, that pain seemed to vanish from her memory shortly after suffering it.

 

[Tess]

Thinking her brain would stop flip flopping in her skull once she saw and spoke to the girl she'd hit with her Mucus Marble™, Tess was absolutely unsurprised to find that her brain decided to swap from flipping around to simply ricocheting in all directions. The light was dim, but the burns and the injuries to the girl's face - likely self inflicted, she surmised - were visible. The problem was that they were, for lack of a better term, weird. They were healing as she watched. Slowly, but far, far faster than what was normal, even when one considered that in medicine there was seldom anything that was truly 'normal'.

The only time she had seen healing speeds like that was from spells, enchantments, or other types of magic and, usually, if they healed that fast it was a specific spell. Slower healing meant a broader range of magical targeting, but this was both broad and specific. Her brow furrowed in thought as she ran everything through her head.

The girl was, if she were to take a stab in the dark, most likely not a spell caster herself. Between the simplistic speech and rags she wore, she figured the girl was more the beneficiary of another wizard or the victim of one. Personally, Tess hoped it was the former than the latter.

"Uh... Its a kind of medicine. It helps with healing injuries," she gestured to the fire nearby where her clothes were drying and her bag rested where she'd been sitting. "You can join me while I find what I need to help you?"

Maranae

 

[Maranae]

This close, Maranae could feel the presence of other things of magical nature on and about Tess's person. Tess had surmised correctly that the chimera was no caster; not only was she incapable of understanding how magic worked in its entirety, she was equally incapable of actually practicing it. The dynamo of strength within her - all her supernatural abilities - stripped any latent magical power she might have otherwise had. Further, it pulled magic from the environment around her, creating a nearby area where magic was greatly reduced in effectiveness.

Maranae did not understand any of the feelings she was getting from Tess, of any of the enchantments wreathing the young woman. The only thing she did understand was that the woman had a fire going near to hand - a thing that the chimera greatly disliked - and that, whatever it was she had done at the outset, the woman was not making any further attempt to hurt her. That seemed good enough to her.

Moving out of the river, water rolling off of her as she waded out of the knee-deep mud, Mara drew near. She kept far back from the fire, eyeing it distrustfully. "I do not need any polt-ices to help. My hurts always heal, they do, they do!" She circled back out of reach of Tess, and then leaned in carefully, delicately sniffing the woman from afar. She could smell arcane ingredients about her person, among other things too indistinct to make out. She looked up into Tess' eyes questioningly.

"Why is pointy hat lady out here by herself? Not safe, it is not safe. Barking dog things at night, must sleep in trees," she said, still remaining out of reach.

 

[Tess]

"Well, yeah, most injuries heal given time," the mage said after a moment, though this girl's injuries were healing fairly rapidly which dumbfounded the logical side of Tess's brain.

She took a seat by the fire, figuring if she sat down she would probably appear less threatening to the youngster that she'd inadvertently burned somehow. The immediate thought was an allergic reaction to the goop's consistency, but that was unlikely. Allergic reactions took some time to trigger as the body went into overdrive. For the girl, it had appeared to burn on contact which meant it had to be something else, probably something magical or enchantment oriented if she had to guess.

"Barking dogs?" she said at the girl's comment about the predators she'd run into already. "Uh... well, that makes sense, actually."

She looked up at a nearby tree and thought a moment. A fire in the tree would be counterproductive at best and had failed all five times she'd tried it sober and once in a spectacular fashion when she was drunk, so much so that she was pretty sure she was still wanted in Alliria for arson in that particular neighborhood.

"I can rig something up when I go to sleep later, but for now the fire is warm. Besides, it gives me light to work by," she said with a gesture at her bag. "I'm out here looking for Stoneroot."

Maranae

 

[Maranae]

"Light?" The girl asked, cocking her head to one side. "Is plenty of light now," she added. The last of the light from the sun was fading and everything had fallen into the dusky twilight just past sunset. For Tess, anyway; to Mara, everything was as bright as a clear day, except for the fire which hurt her eyes. That light reflected from her eyes in the same way it would have from a cat or a dog, or the hyena's she had called 'barking dogs' a moment before.

Nostrils flaring as she took in the scent of the woman and everything around her, she cautiously crept a bit closer. After a moment of nothing else happening, she came to very nearly within arms length of the young mage. So close, the burns on her skin were painfully obvious.

"Things at night not like fire," she observed. Was a sensible observation, seeing as how she didn't particularly like it, either. "Maybe not bother hat lady?"

Mara squatted down on her haunches, and stared intently at Tess. She was eyeing all the things that were on the woman's clothes with curious interest. The memory of the burning pain seemed to have slipped through her mental fingers now, though she did rub at her face, smearing the blood still weeping from the gouges that her claws - which were not, it should be point out, present at the moment - had made. The wounds had nearly closed entirely.

"No know what this stoneroot is." Her stomach rumbled loudly, and she made an odd face. "Is food?" That seemed to remind her of the large herbivore she'd killed just before this woman had shown up. She glanced back up the way she had come, head cocked to one side as if to hear better. She could hear things working on her hard earned kill; the grumble in her stomach turned into a faint growl at the back of her throat that she seemed to be completely unaware of. "Hungry," she said absently.

 

[Tess]

"Hat lady?" Tess said, confusion at the girl she'd met giving way to confusion on who the hat lady was. Two stray brain cells, neither doing anything in particular, rebounded off of each other like two schoolchildren bumping into each other on the leisurely walk to class sending sparks of recognition in all directions. She was the hat lady which, if she were honest, made perfect sense. She did, in fact, wear her large, floppy, pointed hat almost everywhere, even into places that it probably shouldn't go like, for example, windswept peaks, rowdy taverns, and undersea caves which was a story all its own and probably wouldn't interest the strange girl squatting by the fire.

"Well, usually the predators out here leave me alone if I have a fire going," she stated blandly, pointedly not mentioning how many times it went out when she was asleep and then subsequently attacked.

"Uh, Stoneroot is... Well, I guess you can eat it. Most people use it for potions and stuff, though."

Her own stomach growled when she heard her guest's belly signal its emptiness. She scratched lightly at her stomach and shrugged.

"Yeah, I ran out of food the other day," again, pointedly not mentioning that 'the other day' was that morning while running from hungry animals. Again. "I figured I'd try to find something tomorrow or maybe see if there was a village nearby."

Maranae

 

[Maranae]

Potions and stuff, as it turned out, were not things that Maranae was interested in. At the mention of her not having any food, though, the little chimera brightened up. "Is not problem!" She got up from her squat, and danced a little dance. "Mara has food! Mara has food! Wait, while she goes to get it!"

And like that, she was off, up and over the rising bank and down the way. The sound of her cutting through the tall grass was muted, as though she had a natural and uncanny talent for moving silently that required neither thought nor attention to achieve.

A minute went by, and that turned into minutes. A muffled sound came drifting on the wind blowing from the interior, and after a little longer, the strained grunting of the chimera was loud enough to hear. That scene, as it turned out, was comical enough in its own right, if not for the fact that the act was enough to cause serious doubt as to what, exactly, the girl was.

Claws in her hands (which had not been there shortly ago) hooked into the great horned head of the plains beast, and her feet scrabbled at the struggled to find purchase as she dragged the beast closer to where Tess was at. The thing outweighed her at least twelve to one, and yet she was able to move it. Sweat gleamed on the redhead's neck and arms, and every tug only managed to shift the thing a few inches, but she worked at it with an incredible will.

"Food....here...can share..." she panted as she continued to haul the dead thing closer.