Night's Rest in Torn
The drone bobs up and down a reed’s length in the open air as if in open sea. The shardstone fixed to its center scintillates sanguine into violet. Invisible, the beam that pulsates from it, steadily crafting hyper-dimensional forces and the will of scavengers and the will of those long extinct into a bubble whose transparent shell is aglimmer in a byzantine-crimson barrier photon-thin yet borun-hard.
Shardfire crackles with the sound of electronic whispers. Crimson, rose, vermillion, the flames. Burns not just shardstones but the dry chitin of the barrauch and the pseudo-grasses whose silver-gold blades are patterned thoroughly by some mystic omen. In the smoke: prescience. Those that breathe it in feel the emotions of the morrow. Smokestacks trail off listlessly through the shardstone drone’s bounded field, set it aquiver; a vaguely distant, bass-filled warble that is heard through the skin with a tickle of mania.
Their spears glint in the radiance. A Myra warlord who hasn’t seen the sun, moon, or stars in 70 days smokes a pipe of ceretid spice to dull that mania as he listens to their drifter tell them the histories of the people of Tell, washed away as they were by the Great Dying’s death tides with all their wisdoms and treasures and virtues too. With them, the Inan, the Heart-Giver, whose hood hides their red-on-black eyes, their darkened veins, the taint of shardscience hideous upon their flesh. Smiles though, the Inan. They have not heard this story. They will not forget it.
This scavenger ring rests here this Torn-night underneath the fate-absent void streaked in twilighting missiles disguised by shinestorm stormclouds, the fumes of yon distant Sea of Myst, Lake Spectrum, the rise of ash from the eastern Blightwoods and by the obsidian monsoon who dominates the Circle of the Heart. Their sunless road has wound otherworldly through wild ruin. May they return soon home. May they return home with the secrets of their people’s salvation.
GLOSSARY
BORUN - An indestructible metal gray and black that feels as if it were cut from stone. This material was what the Zenith People used to build their cities, their shardsciences. Many wonder what hyper-dimensional cataclysm could have warped so mighty a realm.
INAN - A Heart-Giver; one who has given their services to the mysterious Entity within the hidden dimension called the Redshift. In exchange for completing its task, it installs into their minds knowledge of artifice, bloodcutting, and shardscience.
SHARDSTONE DRONE - Shardstone Drones have been scavenged throughout Torn. Scavengers who attune to them can use a borun armband (that shrinks to their size) to mentally give the shardstone drone orders. Among their capabilities, of which many models exist, are:
Forcefields for protecting a camp.
Audio and visual light-recording.
Shardlight rays for cutting through non-borun metals.
Force manipulators to serve as hands as needed.
Akaran shardscience is still many years, perhaps decades, from replicating such a device in Akara.
