[b][i]——Knō to Du Sang, Siepf's Perspective[/i][/b]

Around him, the air that rolled from the wend grasped wet and heady. Siepf sniffed, and took in the herbaceous, sharp scent the wend wind carried. In his bowels, it stirred passions of ancient hunger, of fragrant, medicinal decay obscured by root-burned incense and confined as in a shroud by peels of sap-slickened bark. It reeked like the wound-temple above Vor’zat, or as he imagined from its ghastly, ancient yarns. A puff of air erupted from his nostrils, and by that he rid himself of the thought.

At his side, Talt fiddled with his pith. Siepf huffed, eager to get along with his mission. The need for Turifaar to be evacuated was, as expressed by the Sodality, imminent. 

[i]“Come on, already,”[/i] Siepf barked, and dropped to all fours. Pressed back against his skull, the uneven fringes of his large and pointed black ears vanished into the carmine shadow of his raincoat hood. Tension built in his hind legs. It was time. Heedless to his companion’s readiness and with a primal grunt, he dashed peremptory into the wend. Ghosts of trees writhed before him, trunks napped with bright verdant moss. Vines heavily grasped their curvaceous branches, if vines they were — aloof shadows, they seemed, that skulked and menaced at the fringes of the mist-bound lattice of argent prisms, but ever kept their distance. That same mist that dominated his vision dampened his black snout. 

Ever to him a capricious enchantress, light seemed as eager to obscure the world as she was to expose it to plain, simple view. 

Soon the trees straightened, the vines faded, and he felt a soft, familiar crunch underfoot. Pine barrens, perhaps. He sniffed, and into his nostrils flooded that sharp scent of home, but he missed another: Talt, his companion on this mission. Instead, a third, alien aroma assailed him, almost to the point of a fearful oblivion. He stepped back, and glanced over his shoulder. Talt was not there, and the tell-tale shimmer of the wend likewise seemed absent. A shiver ran down his spine, and he opened his mouth to mutter a stray oath. He thought better of it, for what he felt wasn’t merely the terror of a wrong turn into an unknown grove, but a herald of death that lurked at the edge of his awareness.

His eyes narrowed, and he took in the lightened mist. No longer silver. It was pink. A faint crimson. His tongue flicked out, and he tasted blood. By instinct, he felt he should turn and leave. But no wend remained behind him, nor was he certain of his ability to find it again. He stood upright, and extracted his pith from the satchel fixed upon his chest strap. Communication matrix toggled, yet he heard only his nerve-rattled breath. That was a fact on which his training touched, that within a wend there was no communication.

[i]I must still be inside,[/i] Siepf thought, then realized that it would be unwise to dwell here too long, that he needed to pass through, not linger, lest he become bound to the distortion through which he meant to be only a brief visitor.. He plodded along, and the red mist deepened. His dread increased, along with that foul, alien stink. All scents eventually betrayed their inherent natures, and this stunk of a kind with which he and his pack possessed an ancient enmity toward.

Too late, he saw wall tower out of the thick, crimson fog. Too late, he heard the crunch of desiccated twigs and grass beneath the stride of his stalker.

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[b][i]——Knō to Port Solt, Talt's Perspective[/i][/b]

[i]“Siepf, wait!”[/i] Talt shouted, his hand futilely outstretched.

He grasped the mist-laden stillness, his clenched damp palm.

Within the wend, travel was dangerous and natures deceptive. Empiricism and time were often unreliable. What mattered was one’s mental focus, as the convictions of the mind influenced the stability of the destination. This was information direct from the guidebook. Meanwhile, Siepf was fleet, and though Talt struggled, he inevitably ceded to stillness his steady, slow trot once his faster companion departed from his vision and he no longer heard the tell-tale thrash of disrupted forestation.

[i]“Well, Svotaktak, what do you think?”[/i] Talt worried.

Along the nape of his neck, his dralif tattoo pulled away from his skin. He couldn’t see it directly, but he felt it—like dried gum or a wound-treating plaster ripped away, but only in part. A constellation that scintillated citrine at his periphery, it hovered a few centimeters behind his ear. Into it, it whispered with a voice deep and rustic, like the scent of warmed toegi bread or the groan of a pulo tree’s fruit-laden ebon branches in the season of harvest, [i]“Remain calm, proceed at a steady pace, visualize as specifically as possible where you are going.”[/i]

Exasperated, he resumed his walk. It frustrated him to be told what he already knew, already suspected. Turifaar was his destination, the island that moved. Numerous ecosystems competed upon it, from karsts, to deserts, to jungles that robed its shell in dense tropical vegetation. Did it have beaches? He closed his eyes, and walked on. [i]Maybe.[/i] Frayed strands of the warped space caressed his flesh and shifted around his garb. Barefoot, he felt how the warm, large, flat stones of the park transformed, crunched as autumn leaves, and then disintegrated entirely to soft, hot sand. The moisture in the air dissipated, and an arid breeze struck him full in the face.

All at once, static buzzed at his hip. 

Another step took him onto a broken shore, and the grainy audio smoothed to something he deciphered as the pith’s wideband. It played lilting orchestral music, the bass of the drog tempered by an orgz that undulated and droned. It was the same station he set it to before his departure, although the melody was further advanced in its performance. Quietly, he scanned the horizon. No Siepf. No jungles. A broken, shattered shore. The ruins of a city. In his nostrils, the acidic stink of dust and ruin and a poisoned sea. 

[i]“Svotaktak, is this Turifaar?”[/i] Talt wondered. Again, he suspected he would be answered with his fear, rather than a solution. Again, his fear manifested as reality. [i]“No,”[/i] his ano-form dralif answered, [i]“This was Port Solt, a cycle of what you call Red Brother after the catastrophe.”[/i] 

Anxiety filled Talt, and he dropped to his knees. The hot day stars pounded down on his head, and he pulled his hood up to preserve his precious moisture. Late and in the wrong place. How did it go so wrong? Fist lofted, he slammed it down upon the beach. Unexpectedly, he struck something solid. A smooth, hard shape stirred out of the depths by either the quake or the tsunami, now covered only by a thin camouflage of sand. Curious, he dusted it off. It seemed black, at first, but not like the pulo tree. It seemed more the absence of color, or a hue that sat beyond his ability to perceive.

[i]“Svotaktak, what is this?”[/i] — a moment that stretched, unanswered. He began to think his ano tattoo had broken. Then, after several minutes, wherein Talt examined the object — it was cold, fist-sized, and shaped like a thick crescent with a reverse of itself that penetrated its core — his tattoo responded: [i]“Inconclusive.”[/i]

As he strained his sight on the distance, Talt attempted to pierce the bronze sky occluded by dust and dominated by low nimbostratus clouds that angrily rolled north, away from the inland sea. Through the murk, he imagined miniature outlines of rescue craft that hovered like so many gnats over a corpse. For over an hour, he walked. As he came nearer, he tuned his pith to the worldband search and rescue frequency. Now nearer, he easily observed the wires that dangled and twisted out of the guts of the metal, wingless vehicles that floated in the sky and heaved rubble off of those trapped below.

Also, he saw a man who. Like him, he walked toward the city from the sandy dunes that girded its north and west and extended as far as starling’s flight. Talt fell into step with him as they neared the outermost ring of collapsed structures and frenzied aid workers, just as a rather famished, gaunt, and unfamiliar type of humanoid brushed past them: a figure who, while hunched, towered over Talt. She reeked of — was it rust? Unsure and afraid of her, Talt shifted his eyes down. Rather than the dark, rough-armored form, he searched for someone to whom he might report.

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