Interlude - Mother of the Fens

"Mother. Mother. MOTHER!?"

With a shift of the wind striking another angle the temperature in the mountain cavern had dropped again from icy to well below freezing as Reinvar tried to rouse the gracefully aging blonde woman from her trance.

"Yipa?!"

"Yes child?" She replied her piercing blue eyes instantly focused on him as if she hadn't been sitting still for hours on the freezing floor.

"... I'm… it is cold." Reinvar said carefully knowing from painful experience that any complaint or if he phrased something petulantly he would be ridiculed and forced to endure.

"Hmm," she frowned at him. "Yes."

She rose from her spot on the floor with a sigh. The cave they stood in barely high enough for either of their tall frames.

With a flick of her essentia the howling wind stopped, bringing significant relief.Then, as she did most nights when they stopped to camp, she pulled out a sharp chisel and carved a rune on the flattest surface she could find. In moments the rune flared with essentia and began to glow a blue light, it didn't give heat so much as suck away the cold of the cave.

"Can you teach me rune carving?" Reinvar asked.

His mother gave him a long look. It was a look that he was becoming accustomed to that seemed to be equally considering the question deeply and accusing him of stupidity.

"If your aspect allows, I will teach."

"My aspect," Reinvar sighed, "Which you can't figure out."

The deep hum she responded with he had come to understand to be a sigh.

"You aren't a Stoneman, and you aren't a Silvanman," she replied. "As a volva, I do the seidr, but I only had one vision - the one that sent me south to make you."

She paused and her face was tight, she spoke softly and glanced at Reinvar with a complicated look of admission or contrition.

"I ask the underworld what their plans are for you, but…." She sighed. "We go to the forests and they say: he is ours but not ours. We go to the mountains and they say: he is ours but not ours... I do not know."

The pause was pregnant with meaning as Reinvar waited patiently for her to finish her thought.

"Your father was of the forest - a warrior of hardwood, flesh filled with life. My aspect is the mountains - my essentia is cold and drains men's vigor. You are dead wood, or living stone … both forest and mountain, and neither. You must find your own path and forge your own aspect. We go find rúnsteinn that will suit your attunement, from these we discover your aspect."

Reinvar flushed with excitement. His father had hid in the woods and whispered promises of adventure. It seemed his mother would be the one to fulfil them.

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But while his father had been a feckless dreamer he was still his father and he had not forgotten his curse. Once he had the strength to make it happen, the Eruleans devils would pay.

The path the two took down through the deep mountainous forests was spectacularly beautiful. The land they wandered was deep in the barely claimed territory between the Silvanian Kingdoms and the Stoneman Clans and it was rare that they would run into either in the overworld.

Their forays into the rifts of the deep wilds was another story.

"Why are there rifts out here so far from people?" Reinvar asked his yipa one day as they prepared to delve into the second rift they had encountered that week.

"We are here? Are we not people?" She asked, genuinely perplexed at the question.

"I mean far from either the Kingdoms or Clans…"

"The underworld cares about power, not the politics of people. People make politics around the power of the underworld."

"But what are the rifts fighting for, if there is no one out here?"

"The rift beasts squabble for territory to claim the essentia of the overworld. They push against their enemies, and against their allies nearly as much… If the rift beasts sense an opportunity to battle for territory - they will."

"So they sense our power and make the rifts for us to delve and fight their enemies," Reinvar speculated.

His mother snorted with laughter.

"You think much of our value," She answered. "The wild rift beasts are just that - wild, they do not have 'purpose,' they fling shit to the wall and hope for it to stick. The old and powerful beasts however…"

Yipa scowled and spat, giving Reinvar a glimpse of the Stoneman witch that his cousins had feared so much.

He had began to get comfortable in her presence in the time they had travelled together, she was tough and her ways were totally foreign to how he had been raised by his father and extended family. As their understanding of each other's language deepened they began to understand and connect.

They frequently delved and they found several ability stones. Rúnsteinns his yipa called them and she laughed as she explained that that meant stone and that even the Eruleans called them calculus which meant stones, but the supposedly funny part was that they weren't stones at all. She emphasised that lesson by setting an ability stone to float in water, then banging the stone against a rock till it shattered the rock.

With her expertise and his developing power they began to become formidable in rifts. His yipa had been from the start - he guessed she was probably at least tier five and she was scary with her raven familiar and suite of spells that dominated their enemies movement and drained them of their health points.

Reinvar was starting to understand his eventual power set. They had found a pair of axes which he held in either hand; he could throw them to catch a fleeing enemy or use them in a flurry of blows. Their versatility proved perfect for his developing class which shifted from a generic defensive warrior to a Fenbound Brute. It was a product of several ability stones with synergistic capabilities that made him defensively powerful, allowing him to take damage which he could regenerate through by doing damage himself. He also found abilities that let him slow enemies he damaged, an incredibly strong combination that made him difficult to kill and impossible to escape from.

His yipa was right, it was neither a silvanman or a stoneman attunement and sadly it did not allow him to learn rune carving. As the aspect began to take shape he lost the sadness at that revelation as it seemed the unique blend was exceptionally powerful.

It was with a great deal of pride he checked his avatar as they joined their latest rift.

Reinvar Umfridus 682/682 | Level 0

Axeman / Fenbound Brute / Bruiser

It was good to see a bump to his health points with his rise to tier 2. He smiled to himself, feeling the power of his body.

As a gap appeared in the space in front of him fluidly as if the trunk he stood within opened a curtain he sighed and the smile faded. They were in a Silvanian nexus for this rift, so he would probably have to do the talking - to the incompetents and idiots they were inevitably teamed up with.

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