big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss big pusspuss
Between two great quillwort trees of ancient stature, about four or five metres up from the forest floor, there fell a bright and dazzling sunbeam. In that sunbeam drifted nothing but the dust of travelling fern spores, and, occasionally, a wizard. The light dappled past the swaying leaves of the canopy, changing shape with the wind. Like the wizard, the flecks of sunlight where now broken, now unbroken, now here, now nowhere to be seen.
Now nothing. Now a wizard.
Calign levitated in silent upright meditation, the white folds of its robes spilling down around it, arms limp at its sides, its wooden horns blooming gently in the light of the afternoon sun. At no particular signal, it fell slightly, flicked its cervine ears, and pushed off from a bough to float weightlessly forwards to where its curios were waiting.
It was an androgyne, delicate as the doe and yet hard, antlered, like the buck. Its body was slight, its face quite soft. Yet it bore the claws of a hunter, and so its people called it Sire.
They were simple people. Their women gathered pith and fern and nursed. Their men would hunt and fish. They seldom spoke, and often sang, and rarely ever thought; Calign kept them because they were family, of the tribe that had once borne him. He kept them also to study them, and for this they were left untouched, bound by his spell but labouring under no command, permitted the art of wooden spears and body paint and even the use of fire.
There was no fire here today.
Calign's feet touched the ground and he crouched over what had been brought to him without making eye contact with the men and women of his forest, without even speaking to them. They watched him with nervous, flighty eyes as he laid his hands upon the body of the outsider.
The outsider was taller than the people of the fern forest, and wore... much more. His beard was thicker, his body stronger. His muscles were honed, sculpted even, not wiry and worn like the ragged fern dwellers, not lacking in protein. Calign rested a hand against his forehead, over his bulging eyes. Vomiting, seizure, paralysis of the lungs... a sure sign of poisoning. Malnutrition. This man had taken to the fruits of this forest in hunger, without knowing how to purge their poisons.
Calign explored his clothes until he found what he had hoped not to find, and retrieved it.
Sleek as a fish and sharp as a fang, denser than granite and embedded in ornate bone. Calign saw his own delicate face reflected in the blade of the knife. Unable to touch the strange thing, his fingers fading into fog the moment he grasped it, Calign wrapped it in a leaf and took it with him, marvelling once again at the unearthly weight of the alien tool. The little gathering of foragers watched him go, then disappeared into the forest.
Kampret. Astaga, astaga...
Calign kicked off from the lichenous floor and floated in one smooth, slow motion to a second grove. He set down the knife on a bed of moss, next to seven others. He looked around.
Hung on branches and splayed over rocks were helmets, tunics, cuirasses, and cords laden with charms. Bone, bronze, and polished jade glinted at him all around. On the ground, pairs of boots arranged in a row, as if standing to attention. Between the roots of a tree, seven skulls, all of Calign's collection but one.
He stood once more over the center of the grove, and the great skeleton.
It was two heads taller than him, easily, and laid out next to its spear. The bones had been picked clean in record time by worms at Calign's command; their smooth surface belied their freshness. Calign saw once more the deep scratches on its ribs and cranium, the shattered assemblage of its left wrist. In one place, its spine had been visibly broken- in another, beneath the head, completely torn in two.
Astaga...
Calign picked up the lower vertebra he had broken. There was something very wrong about the way it had shattered, and the way it was formed. There was too much smoothness and growth around the break. Between the destruction of the spine and the removal of the head, this bone had healed.
As he well knew.
What is going on out there?
Materials that did not chip. Hides bathed in some concoction of brain and urine that did not rot. False armour that protected against no earthly predator. Giants that would not die.
Calign knew there were great men beyond his forests, beings like him that bore powers from the Great Before. Men of sorcery, knowledge, and influence. Wizards. Magi. He had never met such men, only heard their presence whispered on the clouds.
It was past time for that to change.
As quick as a cat, the spirit flung itself across the forest, now flying, now running. It passed pools of disc-bodied salamanders, duels of giant dragonflies, the trunks of mighty ferns that speared through the canopy like fireworks. When it emerged on the white sands of the coast, a great beast was waiting for it.
"Buaya! Datang, datang." The big suchus wiggled her huge, studded shoulders and looked at Calign with dumb eyes. "We will go. Come, now, datang. We have a great journey ahead of us."
The crocodilian beast roused itself, yawning its enormous mouth, as large as a rhino and almost as stupid, much taller than its aquatic brethren. For its part, the spirit turned back to the heavy fog of the forest and started to trill a high, resonant whistle from the back of its throat, singing far across the ocean and deep into the woods. Before it had finished, a dozen glossy black birds had emerged from the woods before it. They were plumed like ravens, but bore teeth and horny snouts instead of beaks, claws on their wings, and a second wing on each foot. Their tails were long as lizards', and ended in sleek vanes of plumage.
"Pergi keluar. Go out over the lands and seek the great magi." As it spoke, the spirit handed each of them a magnolia blossom plucked from its horns. "Give them this, that they might know a wizard is coming. Fly safely." One by one the birds departed.
Calign mounted the waiting suchus and clicked its tongue, beckoning the beast to move, and plucked a leggy little lizard from a nearby liana as they began to saunder steadily northwards.
"Witness me," Cal murmured to the lizard, sliding it into its robe, next to the leaf-wrapped knife. "A long journey lies before us, and we have much to learn."
The primordial Lalinc, whose iris was the pool and whose tears were the water from which much life emerged, slept dying in the last remains of her coastal abode. As her last puddles dried and her lichens shriveled, her spirit fell apart like old wood crumbling, and one of her dreams escaped her body like a bubble from a sinking ship. As the First Era ended, that dream found the womb of a mortal woman, and was born as Calign.
Potency
Calign is a creature of dream and not well fixed to the tangible world. Light and vision often misses him completely, as does gravity. Even such things as bone, stone, and metal usually pass through him as if he were fog. The only substance that is always able to touch him without the express will of a wizard guiding it is living flesh, of plant or beast or man.
An obscuring brightness seems to dog Calign by day. The sun typically shines very harshly on him, often diffracted by a pure white fog that settles around him. By night, the obfuscation is replaced by clear and pale moonlight, and he is easily seen. Day or night, it is from this pale light that Calign manifests many marvels.
Chief among Calign's sorcery is his ability to transfigure plants and animals into forms dredged up from the primordial era. The process takes time, depending on how foreign the old shape is to its modern vessel. Returning a bird its teeth is a simple matter, but reminding it of its full draconic roots is difficult. Sometimes it is easier to find a creature that has simply not changed very much since the First Era, like the shark, fern, and scorpion. Calign has a unique control over such ancient forms, especially those he has revived himself, and those, like plants and jellyfish, that dream. The lion, bear, and eagle are strange to him.
The race of men is much more resistant to Calign's sway, as are their artefacts and their beasts. Dead, solid matter, like stone, bone, and bronze, is also difficult for Calign to bewitch, as is fire. If Calign desires a weapon, he must depend on his bare claws, as he always has.
Ambition
Born of rest and quiet death, there is no fire in Calign's heart. He misses the beauty of the old world that Lalinc knew, a world he wishes he could remember. The strangeness of the new world around him stirs him into wakefulness. Calign desires nothing more than to restore the old forests around him, and quieten the constant din of quarrelling Man, so that he may continue to dream, and others may dream with him.
Domain: Lalinc is the Primordial Lady of Peace. She exists in and embodies the ur-state of Galbar, before thought, desire, and conflict. Mortals may hope to transcend their temporal quarrels and enter her timeless calm through meditation, but Lalinc is not a god for mortals. She is a god for trees, mushrooms, mosses, and little ocean things, beings free of emotion and the burden of choice, creatures of only the quietest and purest sensations. In her heart, Lalinc inhabits a dying world: every day the thinking-gods and thinking-men conquer a little more of Galbar, infecting her with humanity, breaking down her peace like grains of sand worn off a mountain.
Portfolio: Lalinc was born of a jellyfish and raised on a coral. She is the Goddess of Cnidaria and Ctenophores, those animals which are mostly water and need nothing more to be beautiful.
Realm: At the shore of a shallow ocean that never ends, that men may see in the dreams of their deepest sleep, there is a special place, a land of little things that grow slowly at the edge of a thousand pools. It resembles Galbar if Galbar was never really touched by the hand of any god. There is moss and lichen and such simple things growing on bare rock, and puddles filled with stromatolites, and gentle rain, and the coast never really ends or segues into land. There are many corals, and every size and shape of jelly pulsing gently through the sea, glowing by night and transparent by day. It has no name, because there is no one to name it. It is Lalinc's resting place.
Domain Form: In her resting place, Lalinc has no form, but she does have an epicentre. In one of the many puddles and pools of Lalinc's realm, where there is a certain cloudiness and bubbling heat, divine energy flows. The primordial soup spreads supernaturally far, seeding and feeding new life as it passes away. On a slightly raised stone in the middle of the spring sits a small transparent sphere, like a marble. This is Lalinc's heart.
Personality: There is a certain humanising force in the Lifeblood, perhaps leeched from the many humanoid gods watching Galbar, and Lalinc is not immune to it. As a jellyfish, and in her domain, Lalinc is transcendent; she has no desires, no vexation, and no thought. Incarnated as a woman, Lalinc doesn't think much, but she does think. She wanders, looking at pretty things, touching them, occasionally thinking, and on rare occasions may even be stimulated to talk. Where pretty things are absent, she manifests them spontaneously, with little conscious design. She is a consummate ditz, forgetting things even while she speaks about them, preferring to communicate through smiles and caresses. The thought of quarrel and violence doesn't occur to her, and when trouble arises, she reacts much like a jellyfish does: stings on contact, and ambles away.
Hero that Ganglion exists to make. You voted on it, boys
Name: Haema Banjil. Banjil to friends.
Looks: A human woman. Good cardio. Green hair. Coat. Club.
Behaves: Smart but not canny, Haema Banjil marks herself out with a mix of general ignorance, narrow-mindedness and low cunning. The first can be fixed, with time and experience, but her intense love of following stupid ideas through to the end and nipping dogs' tails just to see if they bite are terminal. Smiles often, loves with vigour, and quarrels with great joy.
Strengths: A healer. Banjil is the son of the God of Violence and difficult to fight on that home ground. Fists, arrows, and swords will wound her like anyone else, but wounds do not kill her, and usually don't slow her down very much. Most grievous injuries will heal in a day or two, and sometimes she even regenerates limbs. The people around her tend to recover somewhat faster, too, regardless of whether they are friend or foe. This effect is limited by proximity: her lovers heal almost as quickly as she does, while passerby may not notice the difference.
Weaknesses: Everything else. Accidental injuries do not heal and those inflicted by animals are a grey area. Unlike most demigods, Haema Banjil has no immunity to pestilence, no resistance to poison, suffers frostbite in the cold and heatstroke in the sun. Without water she will perish and without food she will waste and starve. The most dogged of Banjil's killers, of course, is age.
Haema Banjil has no immortality and ages much like any human. She also reproduces like one, whether alone or with the aid of a male sire. Every twenty years or so, when Haema Banjil is in her late thirties, her mantle, memories and powers passes to one of her largely identical female descendents, of which there are never more than six or seven. All of her mothers and daughters are Banjil, but there is only ever one empowered Haema Banjil, marked by green hair.
If the Haema Banjil dies while empowered, her mantle may skip a generation, continue its normal cycle, or bestow itself prematurely on a Banjil too young to fully manifest its power. The natural age for Haema Banjil to manifest is around sixteen.
While the Haema mantle may skip a generation, Banjil never does. If all seven Banjils are slain, empowered and mortal alike, no further Banjils will be born, and the Hero will be dead forever.
Father Blood Knuckle | Lord of the Bruise | the Stricken King
Domain: Ganglion Blood Knuckle is a God of Violence. Violence is a conceptual domain encompassing any act of destruction for its own sake.
The accident of a falling stone and the chipping of a mason's chisel hold not Ganglion's attention, but he watches every rock that is thrown with intent to harm. Violence occurs when the will to destroy arises before the will to create and preserve. It's easy to justify violence with good ends, or with self-defence, or with raw instinct, and Ganglion knows every justification, valid or not. It doesn't matter much to him, though. Blood is blood and bruises are bruises.
Portfolio: Where there is ill intent and ill action, there is hurt. Ganglion is the God of Injury. Every cut, burn, and broken bone in the universe is felt by him, and dealt by him, somehow, in some strange ripple along the endless Lifeblood. When Father Blood Knuckle wills for someone to hurt, they hurt- mostly because he enacts his will by beating them with his fists, and partially because he enacts his will by getting someone else to beat them with their fists.
It's very important that Ganglion does this. Bruises teach lessons. One must be tested to know one's limits, and one must have practice to grow resilient. Without taking punches, one does not know when is a good time to sling punches, or how. And, of course, injuries heal. When a fight goes on too long or ends too quickly, Ganglion looks over the wounded and gives them only as much pain as they need. His gaze comforts the bleeding and aching, restores their strength, and gives them hope for the fights to come.
Realm: Ganglion lives and fights in The Dust. The Dust is a simple world of dust, loose rocks, and wooden beams, hastily-constructed half-ruined towers and climbing ladders on which to play and fight. It is bright and it is cloudless and it is hot, with a cooling wind to dry out his sweat. There are hills and valleys that are rather easy to scale, and some sparse pine trees, and fresh springs of water. Ganglion's sparring partners manifest here, big, dumb jolly ogres and bulls and snakes and other such things all looking for a scrap. There is night and a sun, but no stars or clouds, because those are distracting. Food and bandages manifest in roughly-nailed wooden crates, and even grievous injuries heal rapidly here.
Personality: Ganglion exists to fight and hurt and rage and bully, and he is content with this, because he knows that he will never destroy, only injure. He is both a violent man and a very peaceful one. He holds no grudges and encourages no hate, and builds no friendships- everyone too weak for him to fight is his student until they are strong, and everyone else is his rival. In this way he is never really lonely among men, and every fight is, for him, a chance to laugh his hearty, hearty laugh.
Ganglion holds few moral positions. Destroying things outright is fine in moderation, but there should at least be room for regrowth so that the scrapping can continue. Beating things that don't fight back is rather boring, and lazy, which is worse. Anyone who desires to fight has a right to fight, though if you're dumb about it you'll face dumb consequences and deserve them. If you stop a fight where there really should be a fight, you're a lil bitch. If you stop someone from getting back into a fight by hitting them while they're too injured to move, you're about to be offered a new fight altogether, this time with God.
Not to say he's not an asshole himself, though. Starting fights with words or fists is what Ganglion does, and he loves it. Oh, he loves it.
Base Form: Ganglion manifests as a man approaching middle age, with well hewn muscles under just a little fat. He wears a pale green sleeveless tunic and loose beige trousers, and boots. His hair is very short, as is his beard.
Domain Form: As described, but a foot or two (or a hundred) taller with fingerless boxing gloves and a black eye. His trousers and tunic are ragged, his arms are bandaged and his knees are scraped. This is the form he assumes every afternoon in The Dust after scrapping through the morning, in preparation to keep scrapping through the night. At dawn he passes out.
Avatar: Ganglion's avatar is Ganglion-shaped wooden puppet he dangles into Galbar on a fishing rod in case he wants to scrap there too. It's very convincing, though.
Musical Theme:
And there will be no tenderness, no tenderness! There will be no tenderness, no tenderness I will show no mercy for you You have no mercy for me The only thing that I ask Love me mercilessly!
Father Blood Knuckle | Lord of the Bruise | the Stricken King
Domain: Ganglion Blood Knuckle is a God of Violence. Violence is a conceptual domain encompassing any act of destruction for its own sake.
The accident of a falling stone and the chipping of a mason's chisel hold not Ganglion's attention, but he watches every rock that is thrown with intent to harm. Violence occurs when the will to destroy arises before the will to create and preserve. It's easy to justify violence with good ends, or with self-defence, or with raw instinct, and Ganglion knows every justification, valid or not. It doesn't matter much to him, though. Blood is blood and bruises are bruises.
Portfolio: Where there is ill intent and ill action, there is hurt. Ganglion is the God of Injury. Every cut, burn, and broken bone in the universe is felt by him, and dealt by him, somehow, in some strange ripple along the endless Lifeblood. When Father Blood Knuckle wills for someone to hurt, they hurt- mostly because he enacts his will by beating them with his fists, and partially because he enacts his will by getting someone else to beat them with their fists.
It's very important that Ganglion does this. Bruises teach lessons. One must be tested to know one's limits, and one must have practice to grow resilient. Without taking punches, one does not know when is a good time to sling punches, or how. And, of course, injuries heal. When a fight goes on too long or ends too quickly, Ganglion looks over the wounded and gives them only as much pain as they need. His gaze comforts the bleeding and aching, restores their strength, and gives them hope for the fights to come.
Realm: Ganglion lives and fights in The Dust. The Dust is a simple world of dust, loose rocks, and wooden beams, hastily-constructed half-ruined towers and climbing ladders on which to play and fight. It is bright and it is cloudless and it is hot, with a cooling wind to dry out his sweat. There are hills and valleys that are rather easy to scale, and some sparse pine trees, and fresh springs of water. Ganglion's sparring partners manifest here, big, dumb jolly ogres and bulls and snakes and other such things all looking for a scrap. There is night and a sun, but no stars or clouds, because those are distracting. Food and bandages manifest in roughly-nailed wooden crates, and even grievous injuries heal rapidly here.
Personality: Ganglion exists to fight and hurt and rage and bully, and he is content with this, because he knows that he will never destroy, only injure. He is both a violent man and a very peaceful one. He holds no grudges and encourages no hate, and builds no friendships- everyone too weak for him to fight is his student until they are strong, and everyone else is his rival. In this way he is never really lonely among men, and every fight is, for him, a chance to laugh his hearty, hearty laugh.
Ganglion holds few moral positions. Destroying things outright is fine in moderation, but there should at least be room for regrowth so that the scrapping can continue. Beating things that don't fight back is rather boring, and lazy, which is worse. Anyone who desires to fight has a right to fight, though if you're dumb about it you'll face dumb consequences and deserve them. If you stop a fight where there really should be a fight, you're a lil bitch. If you stop someone from getting back into a fight by hitting them while they're too injured to move, you're about to be offered a new fight altogether, this time with God.
Not to say he's not an asshole himself, though. Starting fights with words or fists is what Ganglion does, and he loves it. Oh, he loves it.
Base Form: Ganglion manifests as a man approaching middle age, with well hewn muscles under just a little fat. He wears a pale green sleeveless tunic and loose beige trousers, and boots. His hair is very short, as is his beard.
Domain Form: As described, but a foot or two taller with fingerless boxing gloves and a black eye. His trousers and tunic are ragged, his arms are bandaged and his knees are scraped. This is the form he assumes every afternoon in The Dust after scrapping through the morning, in preparation to keep scrapping through the night. At dawn he passes out.
Avatar: Ganglion's avatar is Ganglion-shaped wooden puppet he dangles into Galbar on a fishing rod in case he wants to scrap there too. It's very convincing, though.
Musical Theme:
And there will be no tenderness, no tenderness! There will be no tenderness, no tenderness I will show no mercy for you You have no mercy for me The only thing that I ask Love me mercilessly!
Dead in turn one. Trips on a rock and drowns in a puddle.
Only exists to flex just about long enough to pop out a Hero.
When the winter wind breathed its way across the plateau, the caged fires clutched their robes to their sides, then let go again, laughing perhaps, or wondering why they of all beings should feel cold. Then they continued their walk. They had a long way to go if they were to keep up with the spitfires.
Little by little, the green hill was growing duller, its grass getting short as the alpacas grew fat. Green Recurve Wings was one of seven spitfires directing about fifteen of them, driving them on as far as they needed to go if they were to find fresh fodder. Too often the animals got lost, when they were alone, caught in the irregular swathes of ashen grass left behind by the rain of motes.
Not so with the inseparable spitfires guiding them, of course. Between the seven of them, they knew exactly where they were, and where they were going, and could see far into the horizon where they had previously been. All day and all night they enjoyed themselves, singing sparken songs about what had over just a few weeks become their sole role in life.
Sometimes they sang too long.
Green Recurve Wings had ducked between the legs of the wandering animals many times before, many, many, and come away safely from its little stunt every time but once. It was only one, brief encounter with the lead animal’s hoof, but it was more than enough, and it didn’t take much more than a bent wing to be lethal to such a being. Stay here, said the choir of seven minus one. Stay here. That’s what the song says. You just stay here. We won’t come back.
You won’t come back, said Green Recurve Wings, dying. I’ll just stay here. That’s what the song says to do.
And so it was. The night became very cold, and awfully dark. Green Recurve Wings lay there and wondered what it would see if there was no light at all, not even its own. Would it see the things that animals jerked at when they shut the flaps that hung over their eyes? Would it see the Goddess?
You won’t see the Goddess, said the 8.6.17a3y82d9-0.6th sentence, which Green Recurve Wings almost understood. You won’t see her tonight. Only one, small part of her will you see.
The caged fire knelt over Green Recurve Wings, the gilded trim of its robes shining brightly beneath its glassy face. Everything was brilliant, now, shining and beautiful and bold under the gaze of the divine guide.
How did you find me? Said Green Recurve Wings. Who are you? You are so pretty.
The lanternhead laughed, and lowered its wooden hand over the spitfire, and lit the censer in which it carried its holy mana, and as Green Recurve Wings felt its bent steel and dew-soaked silk righting itself, it knew that, by the grace of God, it would fly again.
By the grace of the Lantern God, and the mercy of her Guides.
VII
Chopstick stood up on her balcony at the top of the Official Pagoda, stood up from her work with the intricacies of another god’s craftsmanship, and looked out towards her own.
The sky had darkened with clouds and night, but she could see lights everywhere. From the faint, magic aura of the myriad eyekites rising from the tower and the gardens, and the bright, leaking rivulets of mana from the Generator complex below, and above all from the swarm of Spitfires screaming across the distant terraces, fueled by the winds of golden magic. Behind and below them lay a glittering swathe of pure white ice, frosted in thin layers on every living twig of the mar trees that sprawled through the wounded forest.
Wounded and not dying.
She saw the shine of her secretaries reflected a thousandfold under the canopy as they walked through that scene of desolation, looking for errors and finding none. In such a large group, the spitfires were frightfully keen in their spotting, and in no real risk of forgetting their objective. Within the hour the trees hosting that outbreak of decay would be frozen to death, and their motes would spread no further.
She looked down to the Generator that fueled this display, slowly retracting its next set of kites. The spitfires liked these, though they were strictly forbidden from playing with them. Every hour a new set of polymer wings would slowly ascend, as guided by the lanternhead and spitfire wind scouts according to the state of the weather, some to the high winds and some to the low. There were huge kites, small kites, rotary kite-like turbines and kite balloons, photovoltaic kites and lightning kites, deployed day after day to pull the turbines and conduct the electricity that would be stored by the machine.
Chopstick Eyes fiddled with the ivory necklace she had taken to wearing over her furs and feathers. She had spent a long time thinking about what the generator should actually generate. Gold was dandy and ever so classy, but tricky enough to move and work. Tusks had shared the same issues, nice as they were. Paper bills were a rather unstable form of mana, not one she was inclined to let her workforce play with too often. Shells were too weak.
Powders and liquids were the name of the game, then, and colour, flavour and aroma were always in thaumaturgical demand. Even now the Lanternheads rolled out heavy barrels of spice, brilliant dyes and heady incense, fizzling with currency mana. They were good at it. They had learned.
This bird still wonders, ‘til late hour, What will be done with all this power. The ash and death will soon be done. Not long will we yet hear the Stellar Hum.
“We’ll find a use for it, Liv,” Chopstick assured her. “We’ll sell it for something. And we’ll find a use for this, too. The lampnoggins can figure it out.”
She crouched down again beside the device she had made, stroking the crooning Alma beneath the chin. There were a lot of mechanisms in the bird that she hadn’t really understood, and had left alone, but there were useful ones, too. And the more she studied the fragment of broken sun that had washed up in her Bazaar, dusty with centuries of seabed silt, the more she understood of that brand of divine handiwork also. She poured a canister of magenta mana into the enormous lens’s many maintenance tubes, and counted tics on a stopwatch as the shining and the shaking wound down.
“I think it works,” said Chopstick Eyes. “Call Glassy and Hatboy. It’s time to head south.” She stood up. Another swarm of spitfires was returning over the hills, hungry for fresh soot and wool.
I did this, thought Chopstick Eyes, seeing for the first time. I am the Lantern God.
Choppy claims the Lanterns and Kites portfolios in the process of doing a bunch of cool spitfire-related stuff. 5 native Might on each of those.
The rest is from the Age of Lords.
1 Might to teach spitfire society how to herd the camelids on the Kick, which can provide fibre for the spitfires to eat.
1 Might (after Lanterns discount) to give lanternheads the title, ‘Guides’. They shine brightly both literally and figuratively for their spitfire followers.
1 Might to teach the lanternheads Karamir’s spell, Mend Clothes, except it’s Mend Kites now, and functions more as a healing spell when applied to spitfires. I guess I could discount this, but I don’t think there’s any need to be frugal so let’s just make it potent
3 Might (empowered by Kites) to build the Kite Generator, a Monument complex near the Abacadarium that converts wind energy into relatively stable mana. Choppy being Choppy, this mana is disguised as / takes the form of valuable commodities, such as dyes and spices, in powder form.
1 Might (after Kites discount) to give the lanternheads the title, ‘Fliers of Kites’. They have to be good at it to operate the Generator and make the most of their eyekites.
3 Might (empowered by Lanterns) to build a lens-like artifact that converts mana into light, based on a fragment of the Luminous Garden sun that exploded, and also on the beam-generating machinery in Alma. I WONDER WHAT THIS THING DOES.
I had to pay native Might for an earlier Age of Lords artefact, so I'm gonna hope that once I give this one to the Lanternheads to play with, the AoL spending is legit.
I’m going to officially call this a Quest now since the focus has been on dealing with Mar Tree motes for a while. Lanternheads gain 1 Prestige for a role + 1 for questing. They immediately spend it on the title, ‘Magicians’, for obvious reasons.
There was a Spitfire with green recurve wings, three on each side of its body, perfectly stacked. Its name was Green Recurve Wings. This is a good name for a spitfire.
The spitfire Green Recurve Wings had once been a spitfire named Blue Recurve Wings, and before that, Recurve Tail. Recurve Tail lived in the paintings the caged fires had made, and whenever Green Recurve Wings approached these paintings, and asked where this pretty spitfire was, the caged fires said that it had been Green Recurve’s name, a little while ago. Green Recurve found this very interesting. The caged fires said that Recurve Tail was one of the very first spitfires ever made by God, and that Green Recurve Wings still looked a lot like it had looked then, which other spitfires would always confirm. This made Green Recurve Wings feel very special.
For a little while.
Green Recurve Wings liked following the caged fires around. Every morning it would do a lap of all one hundred and seventy-nine of them, including the ones deep in the forest, and later on, when it got bored, it would do another lap of them. This second lap was easy, since the caged fires didn’t move very much from where they were at the start of the day, but it was also hard, because if Green Recurve left it too long then it wouldn’t remember where they had all been, or how many there were. Green Recurve would have to go and spark at the other spitfires, gnawing and fighting over the cottontail weeds or the woolly moss, and ask them, how many caged fires are there? what do they do? where are the ones I can’t find?
Some of these questions would have answers. Some of them wouldn’t. When Green Recurve Wings had found all the caged fires around the Pagoda, or most of them, it would zoom back and spark: one-hundred-and-fifteen caged fires! I found one with a hexagon hat far upstream! he was doing funny things to the water!
And other spitfires would go and investigate, and Green Recurve Wings would fight over the woolly moss, and the cycle would repeat.
IV
The Lanternhead B5Y, whose number was fourteen and to whom had been given the name Hatboy, stood still and quiet between the splatters of a great wave, thrown up from the river and frozen in time. He spoke sentence number 48se28.4.m56.0df9t308c0i.
This sentence was the introduction to a lesson. It silenced the spitfires onlooking.
Hatboy tapped the fifth corner of his lantern-shade with his chopstick hand, as was his tendency, and the frozen wave collapsed, running back down into the shallow river and bouncing off an invisible umbrella as it went. The spitfires began sparking, and, by way of quelling their excitement, Hatboy raised between his chopsticks a smooth bauble of water, perfectly still and clear as glass, and let it rest in the air before them, unmoving. They chattered, and then murmured.
A thin, green strip of something was raised in his other hand. Slowly he brought it to the bauble. A grave would not be quieter.
This, said B5Y, using hand-signs, is what we call, Mana.
The bill touched the bauble, and a second later a perfect sphere of ice fell to the ground and shattered, snowflake patterns still perfectly visible on its surface. One of the spitfires began shrieking ecstatically, and was swiftly wing-slapped by another.
When we toil in secret, said the hand-signs, we who are caged and destined to serve our Lord, this is what we harness. The vaults of God are many and of mystery, and within them lies great power. By riding on its ebb and channeling its flow, we release God’s power back unto Her. Sometimes, as now, She trickles it down upon us- when there is a need.
Several feet away, between a tree and a leaf, hidden beneath the dappled shade, small mote of nothing fell into a fake black insect, which almost immediately crumbled into dust. The spitfires saw it clear as day.
And Hatboy thought, thanks, Karamir.
V
Green Recurve Wings flicked its tail and watched the sun glance on the gold leaf enlaid thereon. Green Recurve did this often, because it was pretty, and because otherwise it would be easy to forget how much there was. Of the three thin bars of gilded glow on the spitfire’s tail, one was halfway finished, and the other two still there.
Green Recurve Wings remembered when it had been painted with those stripes. There had been a hubbub of many instructions, and rituals, and dozens of its kin marked the same way, or almost the same way, and it had sat quietly, or maybe not so quietly, and the instructions had been perhaps superfluous between the grandeur of the demonstrations, or so it had been told, because the demonstrations really did have great grandeur, even moderated as they were, but all of this was rapidly fading, some of it already lost. It existed in the chorus of sparks flurrying between the spitfire circuits, but bit by bit it was wearing down.
Still, Green Recurve Wings remembered when it had been painted with those stripes. It remembered, of all the words signed and sparked, these ones:
Granted to you by the grace of the Skewer Lord, this little wealth, That it be for your teaching, and your travel. May your flame shine brightly in the dark place to come.
Green Recurve Wings called the violent winds around it, and shot into the morning, the gold leaf on its wings shrinking little by little as it joined the flock that travelled south.
Starting with 12 native Might (five more than in the turn change b/c I didn't update the income on the spreadsheet, silly me) and 18 Age of Lords points, Chopstick backstage-spends some points to fund mana study among the Lanternheads and their spitfire proteges. We meet Green Recurve Wings, a pretty average spitfire who’ll represent the species while I figure out how the hell to write them.
The observant Lanternheads have copied Karamir’s mana discipline, and Choppy has bankrolled them 1 Might to learn how to interact with mana, 1 Might to learn Rushing Waters, and 1 Might to learn (and teach) Violent Winds. These spells probably aren't as powerful as Karamir's versions, but they're still useful. For another 1 Might, they’ve developed Enfrost, a chilling spell derived from Rushing Waters. All from Age of Lords for now.
Spitfires store mana as gold leaf on their wings. They don’t seem to have much of a capacity to regenerate it on their own yet.
Lanternheads claim two Prestige for being important.
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