Chapter 498 – Foggy Flight

With M’Beja’s spell on it, the key trembled when Sophia held it, almost like it wanted to move. She turned it in place and found that it seemed to shake more when the tip of the key pointed away from the tree, more to the left than straight forward. That was definitely not the method of display Sophia would have chosen if it was her spell, but she couldn’t exactly complain about it now. It worked … and the person who she’d want to complain to wasn’t here.

Maybe she’d have a good discussion about indication methods with Lady M’Beja once they rescued her. That would be nice. She’d give the Mage a chance to explain why she used something that was far better for dowsing than direction before she pointed out the practical benefits of a visual indication that did not depend on orientation.  With this, she had to move the key around like a really limited compass; if it projected a dot in the right direction or lit up on the side towards their destination, it could be used almost instantly, simply by glancing in the right place.

The comparison to dowsing did bring something to mind. Sophia reached into her pack and pulled out a roll of thick leather cord. She didn’t remember why she had it anymore, but it would work well to suspend the key. She threaded the cord through the closed part at the top of the ankh, then debated with herself on how much extra cord she wanted. Making it a necklace was obvious, but she really needed something that would hang freely, and that meant that tying it around an arm like a bracelet would make more sense, though it would probably get annoying fairly quickly. Maybe it would work best if it hung loosely a little ways above the wrist, so that they key could flop naturally into her left hand when she wasn’t holding it out to look at it?

It wasn’t easy to fix something at exactly that distance, but when Sophia explained her idea to Xin’ri, the craftsmage chuckled, shook her head, and then somehow tied it to Sophia’s coat so that it hung exactly the way she wanted it to. 

Sophia had no idea the attachment points were even there before that moment. Xin’ri’s foresight was kind of scary sometimes, especially when Sophia knew it wasn’t actually foresight; it was good planning. She gave a bemused shake of her head, then held up her arm to look at the key. As she’d hoped, it twisted on the string and did not hang directly down the way it should have; instead, the tip of the key pulled slightly towards the direction Sophia thought they should go. She pointed the way. “That way. Let’s go!”

It was satisfying to finally get to stretch her wings again. Sophia knew it hadn’t been that long since she last had a long flight, but even that was within the World Tree; it felt different out in the open air.

Revanos had no trouble keeping up, but when Sophia summoned an echo to carry Dav because they were clearly going to have to travel farther than her boyfriend could skywalk without rest, Revanos took a spot behind him. 

“The echo will disappear if we get too far from the World Tree,” Sophia warned the Wanderer. She didn’t have to warn Dav; her boyfriend already knew. “I’m not sure what the distance is. I never tested it in the Broken Lands, and it should be farther here because the World Tree is a lot more powerful.”

She couldn’t even check her Status to know the distance, because it didn’t appear in her Status. Scion of the Towers let her reach out to other Towers the way she’d once reached out to Cliff, but that was all she knew.

Scion of the Towers

You are linked to all Towers as though each was your home Tower.

“I’ll be ready,” Revanos agreed with a smile. “We’re high enough to give some time, and we can fly. I rarely have the chance to travel on the wings of another, which makes this an experience to remember.”

“As long as you’re ready for it,” Sophia said doubtfully. She didn’t doubt that the Wanderer would be ready; she was simply a little puzzled that he thought riding on something was a special experience. It seemed pretty normal, whether it was on the back of her father or any of her uncles or in a plane or even a personal flyer. Those things were rarer here, but surely he’d flown on a gryphon or something. For that matter, she was using an Ability provided by the Guide; summoning Abilities couldn’t be all that rare.

“Completely ready,” Revanos assured her. 

The air was moist and heavy, completely different from the air over the desert in the World Tree where they first found the Inchoate Mountains, but once they were over the mountains herself, the fog closed in  and Sophia couldn’t help but remember that part of the flight. There were no friendly gryphons, but there were also no mockingbirds or rocs. The only animals they saw were just that: animals. It was a decent trade as far as Sophia was concerned.

There were no signs of warming stations, whether lit by a beacon or not; there weren’t even any runs within sight for the entire day’s travel. Sophia wanted to say that the lack was probably the almost two thousand years Issvako said it had been since the War of Two Mimirs, but it was more likely that there had never been much on the mountains they passed. They didn’t seem to be traveling through a pass; Sophia didn’t see a road below them, either, and the ground looked broken. It made her glad she was flying.

That afternoon, Sophia found out something she should have guessed: you didn’t get a name like the Wanderer without knowing something about camping for the night. Long before she would have thought to start looking, the Wanderer leaned forward and whispered something to Dav. Dav repeated it to everyone else, “Revanos thinks he sees a good place to stop for the night, a clearing near a spring. He hasn’t seen anything threatening and the weather looks like it’s going to stay foggy, so he thinks camping in the open’s the way to go.”

Sophia had no idea how Revanos found the spot. She couldn’t even see the mountain; all she could do was fly in the direction the key indicated. The fog was so dense that it was impossible to see the ground. Sure, she could probably see a couple hundred feet without too much trouble … but that wasn’t very far when you were flying.

It wasn’t a perfect campsite, but it was a long stretch better than many of the camps Sophia suffered through on the way from Izel to Othala’s ruin. It wasn’t quite as good as a campsite in a link in the Maze on a beautiful spring day, but that was an unreasonable expectation; the deep fog was thick enough that everything was coated with water. The plants seemed happy enough, especially the ferns and the moss. Some of the trees even seemed to gather the fog to themselves, as if their very leaves were made out of fog.

On second thought, those were probably cloudtrees, the most likely cause of the fog. It made more sense that the continual cloud bank was caused by trees within it than by trees floating on islands above the clouds, though obviously Sophia couldn’t rule out the floating cloudtrees as a contributor. None of them had the thick coating of near-white fog over everything, though, so either they were continually stripped by the winds or they didn’t produce as much fog as the lower trees. Sophia couldn’t say which.

None of the cloudtrees was in flower and she didn’t see any fruit or seeds, either. It was the wrong season, but it was still worth a look. Revexy seemed to think that real cloudseeds were valuable, so it was worth picking some up if she saw them. Since she didn’t, it wasn’t worth worrying about.

Getting a fire going was not easy when all of the wood was wet. Fortunately for all of them, both Xin’ri and Revanos carried portable stoves. They carried the food they needed, which was a good thing since they didn’t really have time to hunt; despite how early Revanos pointed them at a campsite, it was already nearly dark by the time Xin’ri finished cooking.

Sophia was willing to pay the mana cost to have the tent control the internal climate that night. The temperature wasn’t bad, but the humidity was so high that it was actively uncomfortable. Sophia didn’t want it to start raining inside the tent, after all.

The next day, the key tried to have Sophia run into the side of the mountain shortly after they started moving. Sophia had to climb quickly to avoid the cliff, but once she did, the key kept pointing forward. She’d guessed wrong about how steep that part of the mountain range was.

At about midday, the group climbed above the cloud layer to see how far they’d come. It was hard to tell; unlike the scene in the World Tree, the mountain peaks did not poke above the clouds. All they could see were floating islands. The top branches of the World Tree were just barely visible on the horizon line in the distance.

They flew for several more hours, then descended back into the cloud layer to begin their search for a new campsite. When Sophia checked the key, she found that some time in the past couple of hours, they’d passed the point it led them towards and they had to backtrack.

The light lasted longer at the top of the mountain than it did on the north-eastern slope, but they still ended up camping for the night before they found the workshop. They were all impatient to get there, even the Wanderer, but they all knew that it was better to arrive rested than late at night in need of rest. Sophia was going to have to take her time to deal with the spell, after all, and they had no idea what the situation inside the stasis was. From the Guide’s note, it might not be very good.

That ended up being the discussion of the evening: what were they going to do if the War of Two Mimirs really was still happening? Who were the Mimirs anyway?

They had more theories than people; the War was long over when Revanos’s first Tower was created, so he knew little more about it than they did. All they could say for certain was that one of the sides was allied with the Archons while the other seemed to dismiss them. Whatever happened to the two Mimirs, the Archons definitely ended up in control of Arcatiz, so that side must have won the battle outside the workshop. What if the other Mimir was in control inside?

Was the Mimir who created the Guide the one who supported the Archons? The Archons’ stories certainly made it sound like he was, but was that the truth? Did it even matter?

What did the Guide or the World Tree want them to do once they opened up the workshop? 

For that matter, which Mimir knew about how to open a single-anchor Gateway? What would they do if it was the Mimir who didn’t support Archons? How would they get him to give the information away?

They didn’t know enough to answer any of the questions, which got on Sophia’s nerves. Late that evening, she decided to distract them with the story she knew of a Mimir.

She knew of two, though she doubted they were the two here. The first was an Aesir beheaded by Odin in the war where he won preeminence in the Norse pantheon. A god of wisdom in his own right, Mimir’s head was carried by Odin for a time to dispense knowledge.

The second Mimir was from a planet far from Earth. Sophia couldn’t remember all of the details, but she did remember that the Mimir were a council of people known as Memories rather than an individual; the chief of the council tried to have Sophia’s mother killed because of her ability to see the future. Sophia’s father didn’t like that and it eventually ended in the death of the Memory of Blood, the man who called for her mother’s death.