The endless waste

[aestrix]

Once, this planet teemed with life. It doesn't do that, anymore. The ground is dry and cracked and occasionally broken up by charred remains of trees. There are no birds, no bugs, no living plants - nothing but an empty, endless waste.

With one exception.

But the world is so very big, and the exception so very small. If someone showed up away from it, they could be quite forgiven for thinking this world is completely dead.




with Sable (Kappa)

with Aisilian (Link)

with Grendyne (Rockeye)

with Temple (Curiousdiscoverer)

Comments

[greatestgift]

"Sure. Pick your favourite," she says, and she digs in a pocket and pulls out several pairs of miniaturized wings:

A feathered pair, blue and brown.

A pair like pale blue goldfish fins, filmy and translucent.

A feathered pair haloed in heatless flames.

A pair that seem to be mechanical, black and silver with angular vanes.

[light_another_life]

She picks the feathered blue and brown ones.

"Do I just... Stick these to my back, and then I have wings?"

[greatestgift]

"Pretty much!"

She puts the other ones away.

[light_another_life]

"Okay then."

Wings go on. She stretches them, and smiles.

"Well, that is convenient. I was expecting to have an awkward flight lesson. Okay, if we're going node feeding, let me get my supplies and my map."

[greatestgift]

"Sure."

Back inside they go? (Sable re-miniaturizes her bucket and puts it away.)

[light_another_life]

Back inside they go!

She flits around the storage room, gathering up several items. A set of potions, a map, a compass, notes, a magic quill, food (bread with nuts and berries in it) and water, several bits of jewelry that feel distinctly magical, a bow, and some kind of swirling glass lens that also feels distinctly magical. She has lots of magic stuff, actually.

"Ready," she says, when all of this is on her person in an organized fashion that suggests she has done this sort of thing a lot.

[greatestgift]

"All right, where to?"

[light_another_life]

"North east. Before we get there, though, I'm going to give you a potion to drink. It's perfectly healthy, it's just - sickly nodes aren't. There's a reason why I don't let any exist nearby. They eat the essence of everything, including people. Stay around one long enough and you'll die. What the potion does is give you an essence buffer for it to eat instead, so yours can remain uneaten."

[greatestgift]

"...Well, that sounds unsettlingly familiar. Sure, I'll try this potion."

[light_another_life]

Nod. "Not right now, though, we're not close enough to it to need it, and it'd just wear off before we got there." To outside they go. "Unsettlingly familiar?"

[greatestgift]

"In my first universe, those world-eating monsters that pop out of the ground are called malices, and they drain... something out of everything around them. We call the something 'ground'. It's - sort of what things are. The shape of a rock or the aliveness of a tree. Everything that's near a malice for too long dies, and if they stay too long in one place or eat too much of a place's ground to use in their magic, the blight gets so bad that everything just sort of shivers apart into grey dust."

[light_another_life]

"... Yes, that sounds familiar. Not quite the same, sickly nodes will leave - something left, everything's not grey dust after, you can sort of see what it was before, but it definitely does something like that. Stay near a sickly node long enough, and you'll start to feel - listless, depressed, tired. Eventually you'll want to do nothing but curl up and sleep, and when you do, you don't wake up. Monsters that are like travelling malevolent sickly nodes, ugh. How awful."

[greatestgift]

"They start out in one place - the ones that can't move yet are called sessiles - and then they grow and learn and eat ground and get bigger and smarter until they can molt into a body that's got legs and get up and find somewhere with more ground to eat. And then they do it again to get a better body, and they just keep going until somebody kills them."

[light_another_life]

"Ah. I. Really hope that sickly nodes don't eventually do that if I leave them unattended." Pause. "I really hope hungry nodes don't do that when left unattended, that would be terrifying."

Outside they go, and up into the air they fly.

[greatestgift]

"And what's a hungry node?"

[light_another_life]

"Sickly nodes are what you get when you take all nodes away from an area and it tries to make more to replace them. Hungry nodes are what you get when you pile a lot of nodes on top of each other in the same location. The nodes start - stealing essence from each other, fighting. Eventually one wins, and eats its fellows. Except after, it's - used to being fed. And then it starts eating more. The after effect is very like a sickly node, in that it eats the essence of things, but it is much, much, much better at it, and feeding it more essence doesn't fix it. You can destroy them, but I don't have the materials to do so yet. The essence potion doesn't help, the node just chews through it in about three seconds and then gets to eating you. I know where two are, I stay far, far away from them. At least until I can kill them."

[greatestgift]

"...What kills them?"

[light_another_life]

"What I have to do is enclose them in stuff they can't eat, and then when the node has gotten a bit more used to not eating things, I have to rip it apart into multiple nodes, and put those in places where new nodes haven't started being made. If I run out of those places, I can just drain it away entirely, but it's harder to do with a hungry node."

[greatestgift]

"Well, that's much nicer than what kills malices."

[light_another_life]

"Well now I have to ask. What kills malices?"

[greatestgift]

"What kills malices is sharing knives. Sharing knives are... so, the people from my world who have magic are called Lakewalkers. We can do things to ground that most people can't. A sharing knife has to be made out of Lakewalker bone, and it has to have a Lakewalker's death in it, and then you stab the malice with the knife and the death goes into the malice and the malice dies too."

[light_another_life]

"'Has to have a Lakewalker's death in it'? Does that mean 'kill the Lakewalker with it', or...?"

[greatestgift]

"Well, usually the Lakewalker kills themselves with it. When they expect to die very soon otherwise. For a Lakewalker, dying without sharing is - an awful waste."

[light_another_life]

"Ah. Yes, I can see how it would be. ... If you can ever get back to your world, and if connecting lakewalkers to the dream world doesn't have any nasty effects, I do see an obvious way to, er, cheat the system. Though it might not work."

[greatestgift]

"That would be an enormous help. If I can get back to my world."