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Dear Diary,

I was really looking forward to the fall harvest festival. At home it was always a time of joy and openness, welcoming strangers and the best time of the year. Here they call it "Thanksgiving" and they do give some thanks, but everyone goes home and eats by themselves (well, with some family, but not a huge joyous group). Home, I don't have a home.

My guardian is gone and the house is empty (I hope they'll come back safely), my friends are all scattered, and my family has been dust for thousands of years.

I thought Ducks might invite me along for whatever he was going to do this weekend -- he'd promised earlier to make time for me (finally), but at the last moment he told me that he was going with a lawacore to visit her folks (well, and a bunch of other law students to her house to have an intense study weekend), and Ari is at school in Switzerland where they don't have the same seasons or holidays.

Guess that leaves my godfather as someone I could visit, but after what happened with the last elves I met, I've decided to skip out on visiting the Sidhe. Tindalasse did invite me for a visit if I wanted to go, since he was going home and he always thinks it is a good idea to bring people along. I just wasn't up to lots of people.

Not that my godfather hadn't been thinking of me. Heck, earlier in the week Tindalasse's dad sent Pork Chop with a prettier Bitter King glyph than the one I had and I've started wearing it on my collar,*  but I'm not an elf. Elves are just too strange, even for me. The Naginata club kids are all going for some tourist site seeing in Los Angeles. They didn't invite me. We work out ok together, but I don't speak their language and I'm not part of the in group pecking order. I'm just a body making the work-outs bigger.

I decided I'd just go hiking in the hills. I could run and ride the red bull and just kind of be alone, not just feeling alone.

I'd already had a nasty run-in with Duck's favorite lawacore,**  the governor's daughter, the one whose dad was running for president, and I just didn't feel good at all. She had come by my room just before the last class I had and just before she and Ducks left, as far as I could tell, just to be spiteful. I ended up crying.

Anyway, I had my blanket, a water bottle, almonds, cheese and bread and raisins and beef jerky (another thing I'd never had before) and chocolate bars. I had to promise myself chocolate only when I was camping. Otherwise I'd eat so much of it I'd need two dorm rooms. Oh, I also had a tent.

Robert-Etienne had shown me where to buy one and how to pack it up on a jog one afternoon and I decided that a tent would be great for the next time I was out -- a kind of small house I could set up and put things in (like more food or something. Now that I thought about it, I really only wanted a tent if it rained, and I could always use a mark to go back to my room, but I decided to look for a good place to hide a tent. This one was five and a half feet by four feet, mostly just gauze, fiberglass poles (metal makes me nervous some times) and a rain fly. It is only about three feet tall and looks like someone cut the top off of a large ball and left it on the ground.

I was still traveling light, but I was dressed with my shirt and pants and boots and (of course) my belt. I needed a good helmet or something, but had my eyes unblocked so I could track and see better. Maybe I'd find something better in the hills.

Just my luck that the busses quit running into the hills for this holiday, but I'd left a mark, so I used it to find the place where the manticore had come through.

Then it was ease through the crack, make sure I had plenty of daylight, and start carefully working my way down the slope, through the trees. First, though, I worked up slope a little, found a place nestled into the hillside that couldn't be seen from up or down slope, and put up the tent. It had no smell, and seemed to block smell just a little. That could be a good thing, I thought, as I left a mark in it and carefully erased the trail I'd left getting there.

Never can tell when it might be a good thing to have a safe place inside the walls of the world you are in. Not much of a safe place, it relied not on magic or technology or brute force, but on stealth. But stealth had served the blue lodge well for many years and stealth is safer than many things.

So, a hidden place to sleep (though I was planning on just a day trip) and I'm off. The sun was coming up in the East (good to know) and the ground was sloping down to the South and West. The trees looked friendly, lapping up to the edge of the rocky outcropping where the crack came through.

Looking around, it was kind of pretty. I was about a third of the way down the side of a fairly steep mountain. Where I was, broken rock tumbled down a cliffside for probably about seven hundred feet down from where the crack was and about three hundred feet up. The forest reached up another two thousand feet up the mountainside before it started to fade. I couldn't really get a good look at how the mountain looked higher up (I was right on it, I needed some distance) and the mountain took about a thousand vertical feet or so to reach the sandy plain below. The plain kind of lapped up the mountain's feet, so there were ripples as it descended another couple hundred feet before the mountain's feet were hidden by the sandy expanse of the plain.

I like trees. There sure were a lot of them. These were tall for a dry area, leafy, but sparse. There were two kinds, cedar and eucalyptus, but the leaves were almost needles. The trees were about a hundred feet tall or so. An end stage forest, obviously (any forest, left to itself, will have giant trees. I've seen the redwoods, but I was in Cathay when the forests were still old, and they had giant trees there too). I didn't see much in the way of animal life, and no tracks. A few birds, but not many, not many insects. Dry. As I got closer to the lower slopes where the trees faded out the soil got thin and rock pushed out, competing with sand to edge out the soil.

I was still moving carefully, move, find a vantage point, scan, rest while watching, move again. A slow, steady pattern. Usually keeps one from nasty surprises.

Then I got one. A nasty surprise.

A creature that was headless, with claws and a great mouth, reared up in front of me. I struck faster than it did. It looked like a giant dry land starfish creature. Two legs, two arms (with two pinchers on either side) and instead of a fifth arm, a mouth on a stump. The skin was knobby with bony growths, armored with horn and illusion. The things could pass unseen. Like some starfish, it had a mouth at the end of every "leg" though one leg had become a great mouth (the rest seemed vestigial), the two arms had split so they had pinchers, and the two remaining arms had become legs.

The illusion wasn't very strong. With true sight I could see them. One here, one there, they seemed to come a little ways out of the plain into the trees, but not far and not many. They used the insides of their arms to sense, rows of what looked like eyes and noses running from the center of the creatures to the ends of their arms. The teeth dripped poison, scorpionlike venom, which I thought a little strange.

The one I killed had a stinger recessed and hidden inside of it's mouth arm (I can't call a stub that ends in a ring of fangs a head, I just can't, especially since it has no ears or eyes or nose or anything else like a real head).

I had decided how I was going to cut over the sand to take an approach on the distant city (it was at least thirty or forty miles off, if not further), riding the bull, when a wave of these creatures converged on me. They hunted as a group, though I'm not sure if it was by intent or just by the way they all sought the same kind of prey.

I decided to fight instead of run. If I ran into the plain, what else would I be running into? If I ran away, they'd always be there. I had range and skill and magic essence and this was my time to explore. I wasn't going to let anything stop me and I had everything I thought I needed.

I did, though much to my surprise, I discovered that having everything I needed also included having Robert-Etienne at my back.

I didn't get any time to talk with him when he was suddenly standing there, shapechanged and ready to fight, the creatures were on us like a wave and the fight was on.

It was different than the fights I'd had with Ducks at my side.  Those were Ducks and I against terrible enemies, but the enemies were always one or two of them against the two of us. This time, instead of one of them, and the two of us in a dance against an enemy, It was a flood of enemies. Robert-Etienne was like an elemental rage against that wave of enemies. I resorted to the anathraxis patterns of martial arts that both freeze and burn enemies with the raw power within. He raged against them, slaying those I weakened. My curses and anathraxis, his shadows and our fighting working together.

Without me he would have been overwhelmed by the sheer numbers. Without him, I could never have killed them fast enough while also keeping them bound by patterns. Reminds me of Ari talking about a fight where she froze them in place so that Amber's fire could have enough time to slay creatures. Either alone could not have done what they did together.

I think the things are like schooling fish, at least they moved and fought and died that way, converging on us. He used his mindlink to share my true sight so we both could see what we were fighting and where the next ones were coming from, though they kept rearing up and appearing at full extension before converging in to fight -- something that must scare some prey but only left them having given us a slight moment to strike before they did.

The things died hard, their bodies trying to come back together, but the fire and ice in our weapons combined with magic, and broke the power they had to regenerate. Robert-Etienne could open wounds that would not close and they could not recover from him, and his vine ran through the corpses, draining the magic and power from them into the final death. Our pattern of my curses, the anathraxis patterns to chill and slow and freeze and his fury to slay what I had weakened and bound, worked all to the best.

It seemed like forever, but suddenly I realized that I was taking a breath, the last of the mind-link faded (but not before I saw his eyes looking at me and his thoughts about how my skin had an almost violet blue sub-tone to it, like the Rukh is red and Ariel is white, and then it faded and Robert-Etienne's shadow suddenly was just a shadow and he was suddenly just a man and not a great frost creature somewhere between a wolf and a lion.

We had to decide what to do next, but we decided that as soon as we had cleaned our weapons and ourselves (and not gotten surprised by any stray creatures) we would ride the bull (well, I would ride, Robert would ride it or his dog some and run along side some) to the dead city whose spires were the great landmark on the plain. At a good speed we could cover the distance in a couple hours, have a rather late lunch there and then decide what to do. I could always just use the marks to bring us back.

.

"Indigo?" "Yes?" "I can't catch any of the manticore spoor in the desert.  The only place I caught it was going up the mountain" "Want to change direction?" "No, that city looks worth exploring, and look back at the mountainside, it reminds me of when the Rukh showed us the Andes mountains." "Wow, the mountainside goes up forever. Reminds me of the escarpment in Arabia. We crossed the sea from Egypt and the escarpment goes almost straight up for seven thousand feet. It goes on for hundreds of miles for each way. But we caught the renegade we were chasing."

While we ran, I asked Robert-Etienne what he was doing here instead of home.

He laughed, but it was a little too bitter.

The Seelie King's Harvest festival was not for him, the taste of betrayal would not go away soon enough for him to be a welcome guest, even if he was the betrayed. Sometimes surviving betrayal is the hardest thing to gain forgiveness for. Normandy's coast no longer belonged to his family, the line was extinct, the lands and privileges given to others by the Seelie King's faction. The local Sidhe court was alien to him as much as too me. His family was half-elven, human wereblood riding that magic. They had only been to the old court for formal occasions, a family that was in both worlds until the troll wars destroyed them.

He was as alone as I was, more so in some ways. I was farther in time from home, but it had passed in seconds for me. He was closer, but parts still looked like home, people he knew were still there (well, the elves he knew, I'm not sure I'd call them people) and he had spent the entire time aware, locked away in a fir bolg swamp, hunting and being hunted by the things there, all alone, never aging, never growing, just frozen in time, but aware.

.

"Robert-Etienne ...." "Yes?" "What was the fir bolg swamp like?" "Remember the sewers beneath Kar Manthat and the swamp they emptied into?" "Yeah" "Well, imagine if the sewers dumped into a cave and then drained out through cracks in the rock and the upper parts of the cave were a fungus forest swamp" "Ok" "Only worse" "Time isn't quite frozen, but you kind of are. So you breathe, you eat what you can find, things hunt each other, but your emotions never change." "It was like being seventeen for five hundred years" "Well, more like fifty years, time passes more slowly. The other hostages with me all went mad and got eaten by the other dwellers in the swamp or just got eaten." "The Seelie Court's sewers are magical, but the Troll King's sewers, the fir bolg swamp, are more like a cess pool compared to a sewage plant." "They keep hostages there, because when they pull them out they are pretty much the same. Usually a hostage is only there for a year or so, ten years on the outside, hostages get exchanged and the rituals and such. But of course my family was betrayed and I was left there to rot forever. I can still smell it in my dreams." "Oh." "Not that a fir bolg has to be all that bad. Usually there is a rocky place, protected and warded with sources of clean food, elven shirassea trees usually.  It is where trolls keep prisoners and hostages that aren't going to be eaten. But when Jean slew the Kvantage Troll King, his magic broke and when the key passed to another, no one cared to do much. It became a private hell with many exits, but no way out." "?" "The cracks in the cave reached other worlds, but they were all places that troll sewage would be welcome. Other things lived down there, too." "I still have nightmares from it. I know, admitting nightmares makes me look weak, but it was very long and very hard. If I weren't a shapechanger and if I hadn't found the vine in one of my attempts to escape, I wouldn't be here now. There are some really bad places that the troll realms connect to." "Lets talk about something else, ok?" .

Wow, that is the most I've ever heard him talk. So, he was like me in a way. He had no family, no real friends. The lightwalker was gone and the house was empty. All he had was his dog. When he and the dog didn't jog with me, they would run through the hills together. The fu dog could fly and carry him if it wanted to. I say "dog" but a lion dog is more like a small to medium size lion in size. They had ridden the power of flight out to the hills where he had caught the smell of the bull and my scent. So he followed the trail, which led him to the crack in the hill side and to this other world. He followed me down the hill, carefully, trying not to interrupt whatever it was that I was doing, but when the wave of creatures started pouring over the sand dunes and at me, he thought I'd welcome his joining in rather than continuing to hang back.

As I'd worked my way down the mountain side, I'd looked too intent for him to say anything before that. He wanted to say hello, but not to interrupt whatever it was I was doing.

It would be good to have company. I liked that dog he had with him and so did the red bull. Maybe he would see things in the city I would miss. If nothing else, if we had more fighting to do, he would be welcome. He wasn't much of a talker, so we traveled in quiet, watching the city grow closer. It was taller than it looked, and further away too, about sixty-five miles away over the plain. I'm glad I wasn't trying to walk that far. There were a lot of things down in the plain, too. I'm glad I wasn't walking on the sand and trying to avoid everything.

The sand had buried the first floor or more of the city's towers, and they were tall and jagged.

.

"Indigo, these towers are pretty rough, I've seen towers like this before." "They look like coral, I've seen that sort of thing before, but it was always in the ocean." "I saw towers like this in a shadow realm, it was ocean too, and always dark, but everything was that the fir bolg drained into." "Sure seems strange, wonder what the towers are really made of, did someone grow these?" "I don't see any seams, they are like concrete. I expected massive blocks or bricks or maybe fused glass like the elves use." "Lets look closer, maybe this is just the one tower and the rest will be different. I sure don't see any water near here." "My fu dog says he can smell the ocean another sixty miles from here, but this desert is as dry as an old bone."

We looked around carefully at the edge of the ruined city. There were some buildings that looked interesting, but it had taken us hours, between the fight, cleaning everything off and the journey there. Shadows were already forming and they did not seem healthy. The fu dog scouted out a broken tower at the edge of town. About a hundred feet up it was riven and open. Dust and sand clogging the opening, and I placed a mark in a corner, inside the tower where it had been cracked open, with a standing place where a swirl in the wind scoured it clean of tracks. There would be no sign or smell of us coming in or out and the place was hidden from view, which is why we had picked this broken tower to explore. The towers were huge, massively tall, and this one was much shorter than many, with the crack in its side we had decided to use starting a hundred feet up and facing away from the city. It was well dead and would make a safe place to return.

Or so I hoped. We held on to each other and I let my mark at my tent pull us there. Robert said he would sleep outside and the bull said it would keep any night insects from him. He curled up in a furry ball between my tent and the rock, with his dog next to him, and they went to sleep, though I could feel the dog's magic keeping watch. Who knows, another manticore could come down the mountain escarpment, more of those starfish creatures might try to get through the forest. The bull settled in and I pulled out my blanket and watched the strange stars until I realized the sun was coming up again. I'd been tired enough I fell asleep without realizing it and had no dreams to trouble me.
.

The concealed ones are actually sentient, with fairly large brain masses buried within their bodies. Most of their minds are used to focus and maintain their dissolution. In dissolved form they are like spirit creatures as far as taking damage (75% resist all) and invisible except to true sight (infravision, inner sight, etc. will not see them until they solidify). They have forgotten what it means to think and have lost their language. But they could think and they could use language if it were taught them. When solid, in addition to two knockback attack pincers, they also have a stinger, with level 2 poison, level 1 curse. They school like fish, and hunt by scent and sight. They have no ears and sounds do not affect them.  They are absolutely quiet when fighting. They are immune to lightning and absorb the first three levels of it to healing. It is quite possible to keep one alive by having a misguided lightning magic user in a group. They also regenerate, even when killed, unless dispatched by burning or freezing to death or by open wounds (or similar magic that disappates regeneration). Eucalyptus oil is very poisonous to them, so they do not venture far into the woods.

In the morning we shared food. He had beef jerky and dried apples and was glad to share them. He had also found some mushrooms that were not poisonous and some tubers of some sort that grew at the bases of the trees. Baked in the fire they were sweet, like potatos, only with a touch of honey-sugar in the flavor. It was a quiet meal, and then we were ready to return to the mark and to explore the city with a new day. We could explore some for a day and then come back, maybe over the Christmas break, and explore some more.

The real question in my mind was whether we would try to fly from the tower to the sea shore or explore the city. The Red Bull was pretty blunt that he did not want to fly another sixty or more miles, possible ocean or no ocean. Robert-Etienne was concerned because he had seen a lot of hidden life in the desert. Large insects, and other things he could not place. He had run fast and we had flown, leaving things stirred up behind us, but not meeting much. Guess he wanted to take more time before he met whatever was in the sea. I just wanted to swim, but as I thought about it, realized that might just meant I wanted to take a chance on getting eaten.

So, we were pulled to my mark in the tower. Then we carefully looked around and used the rosy morning light to find a good place to start walking around the ruins.

There were a lot of ruins. Not all the towers were fine grained coral. Some were sandstone, some amber-like (ok, "plastic" -- see, I remembered one of those new words, this stuff was like sand mixed in amber or sand mixed in plastic) concrete, some large blocks of some hard cut stone (almost like marble) and we saw several of rosey quartz, though they were all clustered at one end. As we worked towards the center, I saw signs of life and Robert-Etienne smelled them. There were people here, even if they did not light fires in the day or lights at night (at least not large ones you could see from sixty miles away).

There was a market and caravans and ... not much traffic coming in and out on the roads. We were more careful as we got closer.

.

Long story made short. I need to tell this, and I will, and the longer story too, sometime. The city is a waystation, it has a gateway into a shadow road that travels up the coast, down to the ocean and further down the coast. Caravans stop here, some people explore, others take trips to the mountains for ore and trees, and the place is bottled up tight at night. The gateway is ancient. I guess I should qualify people. There are the eight to nine foot tall insect-like walking men or spindles -- they look like walking sticks [an insect] made into men and there are their allies, the quaShitheth, humans, but crossed with sea elves, delicate scale patterns glistening on their skin. A half-elven race, long lived, but of this world, not the half-world.   There are also weavers, a group of probably two hundred or more. About twenty of the weavers are human, and they have four or five that are at least half spider. They sell thread and cloth in the market, but they are here because they can gather shells for dye at the ocean and rare herbs and such for other colors in the mountains. I think they have a secret way there, but didn't pry. Ariel would love to look at the threads. Two of them noticed my shirt and one mentioned that they embroider spirit shirts as well as weave them. This city seems to be a place they've come to for safety and privacy. They have their own trade booth, and they and the spindles do not seem too close. Seems that there is another race of spiders that routinely eats spindles. The waystation is cut into a sandstone tower and has walls of sandstone. I'd guess the five caravans we saw in our two day stay were between eighty and two hundred people each and the city probably has six hundred to eight hundred people living in it besides the weavers and the couple hundred in the caravan and market trade. I'd guess about twelve hundred total, plus caravans -- and those are big caravans. The gateway works just like a mark, except I don't have to use a mark there. They avoid the quartz towers, for buried under them where there is still water are creatures of ancient evil that I was not comfortable pushing my source to describe. The coral towers often have shadow vampires trapped in them. Hungry, sleeping in stasis, but dangerous if there is spilled blood or magic. The sandstone towers are all cut by the wind, the city must be at least a thousand years abandoned, and the caravans have been traveling this route for about two hundred years, competing with the sea trade. Sometimes adventurers push their luck exploring the ruins, but mostly it is cautious teams, working slowly and only during daylight. As one man put it, nothing worth getting eaten is likely to be found there. The sandy ocean is shallow, probably less than ten feet deep when it is a half mile off shore, and barren except for small fish and some small boneless sand sharks. The ocean gets deeper further out, but it is difficult to sail, and dangerous where it gets deep. The shore here is great for harvesting salt and small sea shells, or so I was told. At least that is what the road to the ocean is used for now. Who knows what it was for a thousand years ago. The city to the south sits against a crumbling mountain that is a source of modest amounts of ore, especially copper and tin. On it grow spices, and near it they harvest fish. A river runs through the city, creating a channel to deep water. To the north are the lands the quaShitheth come from. They value the aromatic oils and gums and ground bark from the south, the cinnamon and other spices that the dry desert-like plants yield. Robert was in his wolf form when I coughed to draw the attention of the guards, and they mistook me for one of the mountain forest dwellers who summon and master animals. Those are not unknown, though rare, some coming to trade, some for other reasons. They were polite to me and Robert did nothing to disrupt their perceptions of us. I removed my mark from the tower, though we made the mistake of going back there a little late, when the evening sun cast deep shades, and discovered that not all the shadows sleep. I also found out that Robert's blood burns vampires, though they hunger for it just as much in spite of the burning. One bit him badly, and as he healed, it burned. From the fight we took away an ancient shield that had been laying at the bottom of the tower. Underneath the level I had place my mark, where the tower broke, it was empty, whatever had been in it crumbling away from age. The shield was in the wrack at the bottom where Robert and the last vampire fell, locked in combat. He sure is lucky he heals so well, that was quite the fall, even with help.

We got back late Saturday, but I made it up for church. I really want to talk to the lightwalker more about churches when he comes back.

* It is Iridium over Starsilver, inlaid into a flattened sapphire that is about 5/8ths of an inch across. She also has a sword cut into a diamond that is about the same shape and size (the Lightwalker's faction glyph -- very few people wear it or know it, but he gave her one as his ward). She wears both just below where the right collar on a shirt is, just to the right of where a button down collar would connect on a shirt (and does on the oxford shirt she has). Amber doesn't wear a faction glyph as the Lightwalker doesn't really lead a faction and everyone knows she is his daughter.

** Sidenote. Not included as the details distract, but it explains some things.

http://www.uleth.ca/~anderson/hymns/098.htm

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