Chapter Text
The rest of the Megalodaunt’s den was not long to traverse, albeit unnecessarily jagged and grimy in most places, but it was full of simple handholds which made the narrower parts easier to bear for him. Soon enough, Slate found himself just outside a higher, uneven opening that must have led further into the island, and immediately he was taken off-guard by a whining wind, even and constant, driving against his form with a notable calmness to it.
The skies had quickly become overcast during his time in the den, he noticed, and then he wondered whether it was an uptick in Voidfog or only natural weather occurring. The former seemed more likely and came to mind first, given the island’s supposed place of origin, but the visible movement of the storm clouds above him confirmed the latter. A kind of sour humidity had taken up residence in the air, too, not quite pungent enough to cause discomfort, but to enough of a degree to make Slate grateful to be wearing a mask anyways.
Acid rain, then. Not unheard of in and of itself, but Erisia was all the stranger for it.
For the time being, however, the clouds seemed to have only just begun rolling in, so Slate made note and carried on. It probably wouldn’t be so bad.
A little ways in front of him, he spotted the weathered remains of an articulate stone bridge, large and pale and heavily stained with silt. In the past, it seemed to have led to a thick gate carved artfully into the rocky masses surrounding it with greatly refined sweeps and cuts, but now it had all but withstood the test of time, its supporting pillars tilted and broken and its middle half crumpled down into a lower section of the island.
Just beyond the large gate itself, Slate also saw something very interesting; jutting out from the top, there was a smooth ceiling crafted in clear glass and firm grids of iron supports, attached to what he could barely make out to be more stone architecture. It looked blurrily out over the far-reaching horizon, casting so much as a soft gleam over surrounding stone in the wavering light of the setting Suncross’ obscured form.
Slate would have loved to construct some sort of ice-platform to bypass the broken bridge and examine the intriguing sight further, but he knew, glumly, that the acidic humidity in the air would have made any of his frost's structural integrity dubious at best. That, and he didn’t particularly trust himself around such open heights. Not that he was at all scared. No, never.
Instead, he stopped walking once he had approached the bridge, lost in thought. Such old and coherent structures, built so deep into an equally old and enigmatic island. What purpose had they served? In what possible manner, if any at all, could they have been built within such a faulted environment? The lands must have been much simpler in the past, he decided.
It all had a sort of wonder about it, if one didn’t know the ‘wheres’ or ‘hows’. He supposed many things did.
But of course nothing could be purely spectacle, particularly not in Erisia. He’d have poked at the sight with his eyes for minutes longer, strangely fascinated by its inelegance, but the storm was drawing near and there were things to be seen on the island yet. Another time, then.
Just has he’d begun making his way along a series of cliffs not too far away, all of them covered with brownish orange leaves that littered the surrounding foliage to promise a soon-ending season, Slate noticed as something light and fast, a sickly off-green drifted past him, and across the dimming area he soon saw countless of the things falling in the sweeping wind, some of them attaching to his coat to make a short fizzling sound before he wiped them away in distaste.
He walked a little faster after that, and then quickly kicked into a hurried sprint as the bitter drizzle turned into a corrosive torrent, chewing away at his hat by the raindrop, to his utter despair. He hadn’t the ability nor desire at the moment to gaze into the fogged-up landscapes as he ran, which he imagined must have been beautiful in conditions that weren’t acid rain.
Quickly enough, Slate came upon a short wooden bridge held by simply carved stone supports on either side, aged and creaky but otherwise solid as he ran across it into what he only realized was some type of small tower when he was right at its base, then grasping at one of its inner pillars with both hands to catch a deep breath once he was out of the rain.
The very first thing he did after doing so was to take off his hat and assess the damage inflicted. The brown weaving along its outer rim’s diameter had thinned to a noticeable degree, but it seemed otherwise wearable. Were there any tailors or sewists in either of the Etrean Luminant’s settlements? Slate hoped very much so - he liked his hat. It was a nice hat.
The harsh patter of the sour rain outside dulled his senses to an annoying degree, but such weather, too, had a type of wonder to it. He’d seen kinds of acid once or twice before in his travels, and they were swift in their corrosion while this rain of the same liquid was not. The mid-outer supporting pillars of the tower he stood inside had thin cracks and scores along most of its surfaces in which short rivulets of scraping, watery acid flowed down through, but they seemed due to simple age, not unnatural erosion, and the tower had clearly stood unfettered through many years. The acid must need to concentrate in some way to be truly damaging, he decided, which he also thought was a very easy conclusion to come to, and that he should have done so far earlier.
Slate found his head drooping down once he had chided himself, fighting to stay properly aware, and then realized that he was tired. Unsurprisingly so, considering the day’s events and the fact that it was now about closer to midnight than afternoon, and he supposed that this tower would be better a place than most in Erisia to wait out the rain and start his exploration fresh in the morning. Not that he didn’t have his suspicions that there were others lurking somewhere in the island, but he was an easy riser, and felt confident enough in his own practice of self-defense.
So, after finding a slightly-less uncomfortable slope of stone to rest his head upon, removing his mask and repositioning his hat onto his face to act as a muffler, Slate slept, and soon, he dreamt.
- - - - - - - - - -
“I think you’re kidding.”
Isma looked up from the book’s illustration to face her brother in response, then made a sort of annoyed hissing noise, shifting in his lap to lean her back against his chest.
“I’m not! It really says that, right… here! See?” She said, scanning the page with a finger to find the appropriate line, then eagerly shoving the book directly into his face upon finding it.
Slate craned his neck back, reading it nonetheless, and pressed a breath against the inside of his mask to sigh. “Then whoever wrote this was kidding. Do you really think something could come from… what, ‘another dimension’? They’re just big black birds with arms. How’d this even get published?”
“They’re owls, not birds, Slate.” Isma replied, as if she couldn’t believe she had to explain that to him. “And you believed everything else that was in here! Why would it only be lying about these ones?” She asked, turning back to face the book, fiddling with one of the pages’ crumpled ends as she continued reading.
Slate thought for a moment as he ran a hand through his little sister’s forest-green hair, realizing that she had a point, but the idea of a creature intruding from a different dimension in order to consume his mind and thoughts was such a foreign concept that he just wanted to push it away altogether.
“What’s the next page say about ‘em?” He asked instead, resting his chin upon his sister’s head.
“Umm, it says…” She said, then stopped herself short at the turn of the page. “It’s… blank?”
It was blank.
“Oh, weird. Next one?” Slate asked, blinking.
It was blank.
“What..?” He said, confused, raising his head and leaning over to view it closer. “Let me see it.”
The girl gave him a book with no response, and the rest of its pages were also blank, or stained with emptiness, as it were. He flipped a few pages back in bewilderment, but found all of the previously-read ones to be blank, too.
“What’s… Did you… do something here?” He asked slowly, tearing his gaze away from the purple tome to face someone, which took more effort than he thought it should have.
But nobody was there.
- - - - - - - - - -
And Slate woke up.
The first thing he noticed when he did so was that the rain had stopped at some point, definitely recently, since the air within his hideout was still dense and humid. The warm light of the Suncross was just barely beginning to creep through the tower’s opening and blur through his threadbare hat, and he felt fairly rested, so he estimated that he’d woken up close to late morning.
Once he’d groggily shook himself awake, Slate walked outside of the tower and, now with the time to do so freely, looked at it properly. It was not a very complex thing, with simple grooves and carve-work along an unimposing entranceway which was only thing that truly stood out, but its design reminded him of the stone architecture he’d seen the day prior, which was already plenty engrossing to someone like him.
With so much to think about, Slate was beginning to wonder whether everything on the island was truly so impressive, or if he was just an easily impressed person. Hm.
After scaling the tower itself (not easily - it was still damp), he saw five more identical towers scattered across what he thrillingly found to be an incredibly large and unevenly excavated quarry, rising and falling with torn cliffsides everywhere below him. The looming structures led to an even deeper part of the island, cut off by an unclimbable gap and dense with greenery.
If before the island’s architecture was thought-provoking, now it was nigh-spellbinding, leaving Slate to stare at his environment in silent, honest enthrallment for minutes on end. Surely, Erisia would soon begin to run out of its beauty and wonder. If it wouldn’t, then Slate was genuinely worried he’d be forced to stay on the island for much longer than intended.
From there it wasn’t a long journey at all. Slate soon found that there were connecting stone overpasses built into each of the towers in the area, and after he’d blissfully walked across each one it was an easy run-and-jump onto an upper mass of rock to reach solid ground once more.
So far into the island’s thick atmosphere, Slate noted that there was now no truly obvious path forward, surrounded on all sides by ivy-strewn cliffs and thick, swallowing trees towering over him into hard brushstrokes of green and brown. A further distinct acidity was charged in the very air, tightening in his throat as he breathed and straining his eyes as he watched the scenery with thought.
As he moved deeper and deeper, he even came across entire rivers of that nauseatingly green acid, fizzling slowly along their entire lengths and eating away at the surrounding dirt, playing tentatively distorted reflections of himself back as he stared down into them.
That was what let him realize that his scarf was now entirely torn and frayed, desaturating towards its trailing-off ends, probably from the very acid these rivers had accumulated into the atmosphere to cast down upon him from the skies. He scowled a bit at the thought, though the wavy reflection’s expression stayed the same underneath its mask, as if taunting him for it ever-so-distantly. Rude.
But Slate would never let such a little thing poison the beauty of the place, so he kept moving. He started to spot entire roots, tearing out from and curling back into the tarnished earth with grand strides, warped by the acid and humidity that no place on the island could escape. Then there were the jagged rock-faces that littered the edges of the area, drastically varying in irregular shape and size, each swept with what seemed to be disheveled and unpredictable carves of un-meticulous detail. For their resources, Slate assumed, but wasn’t there already the quarry?
Different parts of the environment kept catching Slate's eye as he walked, patient and untiring, until at some point he realized he'd just walked through a wide and doorless gateway without noticing. Confused, he turned around to inspect it properly, but soon found that there wasn’t much to note about it, simple in both design and material.
And then, he heard a noise.
A whirring, almost mechanical noise coming from somewhere not far from where he stood, and it was getting closer.
Not closer, he realized. Louder.
And at its crescendo, the screeching blare of energy being displaced was all the warning Slate got before he suddenly ducked behind the gate out of reflex, and an unbearably scorching-hot blast of sheer, blurry white whizzed right past him, then impacted a nearby wall into an explosion of mud, stone and grass with a noise louder than Slate expected.
He murmured something with mild distaste beneath a low breath after finding his coat-arm lightly singed, then slowly peeked his head around the gate’s corner.
And what he saw was by far the most jarring thing he’d seen in Erisia yet. Marching formidably through the acid-swept territory were great, fragmented creatures, immense and made up of rough-hewn stone with jagged patterns and scores carved into every perceivable surface. Some were permanently fixed into irregular stone overhangs with only their torsos allowed to breathe freely, while others were busying themselves by scouting their environment in looping, deliberate paths, their massive footsteps beaten into the same soft dirt a thousand times over.
Sentries. Guardians, perhaps.
Slate looked to the one in particular that he assumed had fired at him. It was paused, glancing around the area with deliberate turns of its upper body (probably because it possessed no neck), but without rediscovering its designated intruder, it soon resumed its robotic march once more.
They must have been here for years. If not, the island must truly be so consuming, Slate thought. The golems were overgrown in more than a few ways, though the moss and dirt strewn about their crevices did little to stagnate them in their eternal promenade.
But what were they, really? He’d never read of any such creatures, and he’d read of many creatures, so they must be native to the island. They were carved of stone, that much was clear, and the environment had plenty of stone carved out from it, but how did they move? As far as he knew, there was no Attunement capable of moving or creating stone, or any Attunement able to create something that might be considered alive, and then keep that something alive for so long.
He so badly wanted to study them up-close, but if that first golem was any indication of what might happen, his next best bet was to spectate them from somewhere up high. So, he took a measured step away from the gate, but immediately he ran into what felt like a stern wall of soft, black material. Slate blinked, though he didn’t need to realize what it was for his heart to drop.
“A little mouse comes squeaking into my nest,” An owl, for that was what Slate saw, said.
“What possesses it to do so? Please, do sate my curiosity.” It requested evenly, voice deep with authority, and as Slate wearily looked up, he saw its pitch-black talons already flared outward in pleasured anticipation.
Well. He was never one to let a question go unanswered.
“I was only- gherk!” He ripped a dry cough from his throat, finding his voice rasped and hoarse from multiple days of disuse, then instantly prostrated himself and stood firmly to try again.
“-Ahem. Sorry for that. I was just passing through, intrigued by all that this place- ah… your nest, has to offer. I’m on my way out now.” Slate finally responded, calm as he thought possible in such a situation, though his tone didn’t quite come out as even as he’d hoped.
The owl bristled once, quietly, and let out a short, almost childish laugh. “Ah. Carry on then, little mouse. I'm sure you have places to be.” Its beak distorted into a smile, and it shifted its beastly form to the side with a single step to let out an inviting hand for Slate to proceed.
Slate blinked again. Surely, it couldn’t be so easy. Deep Owls, from what he recalled reading somewhere, are significantly intelligent and enigmatic creatures, ferocious as they are cunning. A distinctly small number of truly first-hand accounts of them exist, but from what Slate barely remembered, they never actually attacked unless provoked in some way.
Maybe it could be so easy, then.
“You’d best be on your way now, little mouse.” The owl itself said suddenly, interrupting his thoughts with a deep, guttural noise, and Slate realized he’d been staring at it for longer than what would probably be socially acceptable. “Before my hunger eclipses my own politeness.”
To his credit, Slate was at least savvy enough to know what such a sentence implied, so he decided to do just that.
“-Yes, yes, thanks- Thank-you!” Slate stammered, audibly dumbfounded, and turned back as he began walking to give the creature a timid wave. It raised one hand (to Slate’s instantaneous dismay), only to give its own wave back, slowly curling and uncurling each of its pale fingers in order dauntingly.
However beautiful the island was, and however badly Slate wanted to see what it was that those stone golems stood vigil for, he decided in a final moment of clarity that he would not be returning here for quite some time.
