The Primeval Era-Chapter 75: Awakening! II

Serala felt like she was having a really long dream.

In the dream, she found herself sinking into an endlessly cold crimson sea, its depths crushing her again and again with pressure that should have shattered bone and pulped flesh.

The water was not truly water but something thicker, something that tasted of iron and brutality, something that pulled at her with the hungry patience of forces that had claimed countless lives before hers.

And yet she fought!

Radiant white wings erupted all around her, spreading wide and beating against the crimson depths with desperate strength. They tried to lift her, tried to carry her back toward a surface she could no longer see, tried to save her from the drowning that felt so inevitable.

But nothing worked.

The wings would catch the thick liquid and push, would generate force that should have propelled her upward, and yet the sea simply pressed harder in response. For every inch she rose, she sank two more. For every moment of hope, there came a longer moment of despair.

All she felt was this endless sense of suffocation, this crushing weight that seemed determined to squeeze the life from her existence one heartbeat at a time.

And when the pressure seemed to be too much, when her wings began to falter and her consciousness began to fade into the crimson darkness that waited below, something changed.

Radiant blue lights erupted all around her.

They came from nowhere and everywhere at once, piercing through the crimson sea like spears of pure warmth thrust into frozen flesh. The coldness that had been seeping into her bones retreated before that brilliance, unable to maintain its grip against a power that seemed older than the crimson depths themselves.

The blue light wrapped around her like a cocoon of flames that did not burn, surrounding her failing wings and her failing body with warmth that went deeper than flesh, deeper than bone, deeper than anything physical could reach.

It felt so warm.

So safe!

So much like being held by hands that would not let her fall.

She began rising through the crimson sea, carried by blue fire that asked nothing of her except that she survive, and the surface grew closer and closer until...

"AHHH!"

Serala woke with a scream tearing from her throat, her body lurching upward from whatever surface she had been lying upon as cold sweat soaked through garments she did not recognize.

Her hands moved before her mind could catch up with her circumstances, patting frantically at her torso and her shoulders and her chest, searching for the gory injuries that she knew should be there. The crimson crescent had split her from shoulder to hip. She had felt her organs shifting out of alignment. She had watched her own blood trail behind her as she fell toward stones that would have finished what the Imperator’s attack had started.

She should be dead!

She should at least be dying.

But her hands found no blood!

Her fingers encountered no wounds.

She moved the garments on her body aside with increasingly frantic motions, pulling rough cloth away from her shoulder to examine skin that should have been torn open, pressing her palm against her chest where ribs should have been shattered and organs should have been exposed.

All she felt was her tender and soft caramel skin, unmarked and unbroken, as if the attack that had nearly killed her had been nothing more than another part of that strange dream.

Her head ached with a dull throb that pulsed behind her eyes, and she felt a sense of weakness that she could not explain. But these were minor complaints compared to the death she should have experienced.

It was only now, as the initial panic began to fade and rational thought reasserted itself, that she truly registered the garments wrapped around her body.

Her calm mind returned as her standing as The Holy Daughter of Stone slowly asserted itself.

She tugged at the loose cloth with fingers that had grown accustomed to silk and treated hide of the finest quality, and she found herself holding something that felt like it had been woven from plant fibers by hands that had never learned the refined techniques of imperial craftsmen. The weave was rough and uneven, functional rather than beautiful, the kind of garment that prioritized coverage over comfort.

A simple wrap of coarse cloth secured around her torso with cord that might have been braided sinew, leaving her shoulders bare but covering everything that modesty demanded. Below her waist, a similar arrangement of treated hide that had been worked to something approaching suppleness but still felt rougher against her skin than anything she had worn since childhood.

These were the garments of Dross.

Common clothing for common people who lived in tribes that the great empires did not bother to name.

Someone had changed her out of her guard’s armor and into these simple coverings.

She began to look around the space she occupied, her wing-shaped pupils adjusting to the dim light that filtered through gaps in the structure around her.

The room, if it could be called that, was small and simple in ways that made the austere chambers of the Sacred Grove seem like palaces by comparison. The walls were constructed from branches woven together and sealed with mud that had dried into something approaching solidity, their surfaces uneven and marked by the irregularities of organic construction.

No paint adorned them. No carvings told stories of ancestors. They were simply walls, serving their function without aspiration toward anything greater.

The floor beneath the sleeping platform was packed earth, worn smooth by generations of feet but still recognizably dirt rather than fitted stone or polished wood. A fire pit occupied the center of the space, its stones blackened from countless fires and its ashes cold, suggesting that no one had used it since she had been placed here.

Simple tools hung from pegs driven into the walls. A stone knife with a wooden handle. Baskets woven from dried grass. Containers carved from gourds that held substances she could not identify from sight alone. Everything was functional. Everything was minimal. Everything spoke of lives lived at the edge of survival where luxury was not merely absent but inconceivable.

Even the bed she had been lying upon, a platform of logs lashed together with cord and covered with furs that had been scraped clean but not properly treated, felt dozens of times rougher than the sleeping surfaces she was used to. Her back ached from the hardness of it, muscles complaining about accommodations that would have been considered unacceptable for the lowest servants in the Covenant.

She was inside a Dross house.

Which meant she was in a Dross tribe.

Her expression hardened as the full scope of her situation began to crystallize in her mind, and suddenly she remembered the young man who had appeared below her as she fell.

...!

The young man who had caught her in the skies.

When she thought of him, she couldn’t help but think of brilliant blue flames, the same blue light that had wrapped around her in the dream and carried her up from the crimson depths. The same warmth that had pushed back the coldness of death and given her something to cling to when her own strength had failed.

Had that been real?

She frowned and forced herself to calm down, pushing aside the questions that had no immediate answers in favor of assessing her current circumstances with the analytical mind her master had tried cultivating. Panic would serve nothing. Information would serve everything.

She closed her eyes and exerted her senses, reaching out with perception that went beyond normal sight to feel the Mana that flowed through and around this place.

The first thing she noticed was the aura of a Bone Tempering Warrior standing guard outside this structure, their presence steady and vigilant in the way of soldiers who had been assigned a post and took their duty seriously. The signature was familiar in its general character, the dense concentration of Mana in bones that had been tempered through cultivation, but the specific patterns were not ones she recognized.

She was about to extend her perception further, to map the tribe around her and search for threats or opportunities, when she sensed something that made her pause.

Someone was coming toward the small hut she occupied.

Someone who carried a unique cycling of Mana that she recognized immediately despite its faintness, the distinctive signature that represented a Land and Sky Physique. The patterns were subtle, barely formed compared to the overwhelming presence of cultivators she was accustomed to, but the fundamental nature was unmistakable to senses that had been trained to perceive such things, especially when up close.

A Physique bearer was approaching in a Dross tribe.

Serala quickly came to attention, her body shifting into a posture that would allow her to defend herself if necessary. Her Mana reserves were depleted, her strength was diminished, and she was wearing garments that offered no protection whatsoever, but she had been trained since childhood to fight in conditions far worse than these.

She would not be taken easily.

She would not-

The hide covering that served as a door was pushed aside, and an old woman entered the hut.

Serala blinked.

The figure who had triggered her defensive instincts was not the young man she had been expecting, but a woman so ancient that her mere continued existence seemed like an act of defiance against mortality itself.

She was bent with age, her spine curved in ways that suggested decades of labor and hardship, her skin weathered and creased like leather left too long in sun and wind. Copper rings hung from ears that had stretched to accommodate them over countless years. Bone ornaments decorated a staff of gnarled wood that she used to support her crooked frame tucked by her side, the pieces clicking together with each shuffling step she took.

In one hand, she carried a warm stone bowl that steamed with something that smelled surprisingly appetizing.

In the other, she held a pitcher of vibrantly milky liquid that seemed to glow faintly from within, a radiance that Serala recognized immediately as the mark of Mana-rich sustenance.

Serala looked at this old woman with eyes that had been trained to assess and categorize everyone she encountered.

What she saw reminded her uncomfortably of the Wisewomen who served the Covenant, those ancient keepers of tradition and knowledge who advised the noble houses and interpreted the signs that the Ancestors sent. The same shrewd intelligence lurked behind those aged eyes. The same calculating awareness of everything happening around her.

Even her bearing held echoes of authority!

In the Sacred Grove, such women were treated with respect bordering on fear.

Here, in this Dross hut, Serala suspected the dynamic was not so different.

Grandmother Essun rolled her eyes as she looked over Serala from head to toe, her gaze taking in the posture, the wary expression, the hands that were positioned to strike or block as circumstances demanded.

Then she walked forward without any apparent concern for the threat the Holy Daughter might pose, her bent body moving with surprising efficiency as she thrust the bowl and pitcher toward Serala with the casual authority of someone who expected to be obeyed.

"Hmm, I felt like you’d be up."

Her voice was rough as stone grinding against stone.

"Here you go, eat."

She gestured with the bowl.

"It may not be what you are used to, but you need some energy based on what I saw when the Tokoloshe brought you here."

Her yellow teeth showed in something that was not quite a smile.

"I...haven’t seen clothes and armor like that for a long, long time. I’ll be keeping it for myself after I dry out the blood..."

...!

Serala found herself accepting the bowl and pitcher before she fully realized she was doing it, her hands moving to take the offered items while her mind processed the words this shrewd wise woman had spoken.

The Holy Daughter looked down at the warm stone bowl in her grip, then back up at the ancient woman who watched her with knowing eyes, and she asked the question that had lodged itself in her throat.

"Tokoloshe?"

The one who had caught her was a ghost?

Did he have the answers as to why her injuries were all healed, why she was not dead, why she sat here holding a bowl of soup instead of lying broken upon the stones where she should have fallen?

Because even the strongest salves and remedies from her home, even the techniques passed down through generations of Covenant healers, would not work this well this quickly.

Nothing should work this well this quickly.

Grandmother Essun smiled with sharp yellow teeth that had clearly survived longer than they had any right to, her aged face creasing into an expression that mixed amusement with approval.

"Yes, Tokoloshe."

She nodded slowly.

"The one who valiantly saved you and brought you here. Caught you right out of the sky like you were a falling fruit, or so the others who saw it tell me."

...!