Avishraa Reloaded

Far below, the forest stretched on and on like a blue-green sea.

It was no wonder that its consciousness had been detectable from such a distance. The trees that made it up were restricted to one continent, but they covered its equatorial regions with unusual density. It was was clear, too, that multiple species of tree were involved - from huge mangrove-like growths stretching far out into the inland sea that occupied the heart of the continent, to small, gnarled trees clawing at the side of rocky hills.

The great mind was difficult to contact. It was inward-looking; its long slow thoughts did not often turn toward what was outside its boundaries. But it was possible to read it, in part, and in doing so, there was a sense of a disturbance - one might even say something like an ache. Something was hurting it, in a small way.

The reason was found at the forest's far southern edge, where smoke had begun to rise.

The problem with relying on fire as a deterrent to attack was that, when your opponents were between you and your source of wood, it made things tricky.

Of course, thought Dwathnil, huddled behind a crudely constructed barricade, 'attack' might not have been the right word. The weird blue two-legged things had not, so far as anyone could tell, actually used any weapons on anyone. But it was clear that they had some objection to woodcutters having the temerity to cut wood; in fact a number of people had said, with some horror, that they'd heard words in their heads telling them so very distinctly.

But houses had to be built out of something, didn't they? Crops had to be grown somewhere, didn't they? This was decent farmland, but there was no good rock around, and if there had been, there weren't any trained quarrymen or masons around. And the only other stuff on this shore was sand.

Dwathnil winced as Kedem, the settlement's leader, tried to communicate with the blue invaders by speaking very loudly and very slowly. And very patronizingly. “WE. NEED. WOOD. FOR. BUILDING…”

In the middle of rolling his eyes, Dwathnil saw something flash as it moved across the sky. He wondered what it could mean.

Crystheart suddenly roused from vis impromptu rest under a canopy of leaves to the pleasant feeling of Spinel's six feathered wings blanketing ver, and his head resting on one of vis ample breasts. The affectionate seraphic shieldmage was one of the few male safir left in their colony on this world they called Mind-Tree, after the first sapient inhabitants there encountered; some decades after the tumultuous events of Landing, male births had mysteriously ceased to be viable, leaving one of their three sexen a closed class.

Both elvenoids were completely nude, as was their tradition, and in their slumber their members had unsheathed and intertwined, leading to several small chirps and coos of pleasure from both as the sensitive organs rubbed against each other. Despite his awesome power to raise magickal barriers, Spinel proved incapable of fully forming the mental barriers expected of adult safir, and in their sleep Crystheart had been made to share Spinel's dream — a wet dream, judging from their present entanglement.

The azure bliss of that dream was cut short by the waves of disturbance that rolled off of the Mind-Tree. Inscrutable though it often was, in this case it was clear as diamond: It was in pain. While ve, a Solar, dreamt, the Lunars and Astrals had set themselves to finding the cause of the Mind-Tree's pain. After much walking and mind-flying through the greast forest, they had found what appeared to be small four-legged dragons.

Far from emulating their six-legged counterparts on Home, however, these dragons — these lizards, Crystheart mentally corrected verself, loath to allow them the use of that name — were chopping and slicing at the physical realization of the Mind-Tree. The realization enraged the safir: to not only deny the sapience of but to dismember another living being for petty needs was to spit in the face of Nature verself.

So it was that chieftess Darkflame directly bade Crystheart, one of the colony's more powerful psions, rise and correct the lizards' ways. Ve carefully disentangled verself from the seraph, drawing a saddened warble from him, and sat up, bothering not to close or to sheathe. Ve stood, stretching vis four arms and two wings, and walked over to chieftess Darkflame, immediately recognizable not just by her height even among the already-tall uterine safir, but also by her four black wings, her generous curves, and the flame-like tattoos that covered her otherwise flawless dark skin.

They greeted each other in the usual way, minds intertwining and wings wrapping about each other as Crystheart casually helped verself to one of Darkflame's breasts, drawing a contented smile from both. No matter the often complicated family ties between the safir colony, Darkflame was more than happy to act as a mother figure to the other safir and each of them.

The lizard enemy weighed heavily on both of their minds as they lowered their barriers to each other, sharing in their mindscapes for some time. Once Crystheart had drunk vis fill, the two unlinked their minds and raised their mental barriers once more. They remained in a close embrace, however, that Crystheart — a terribly powerful psion, whence vis name — could teleport them across the often treacherous forest. The feeling of displacing oneself through dimensions rushed over their bodies, and then they separated, turning to look across the field at the enemies.

The takmar had long before dug trenches around the perimeter of their settlement. These were intended more for defense against the larger predators of the forest - they had not suspected any intelligent opponents. When the appearance of the blue creatures had proven them wrong, they had tipped as much flammable material into the trenches as they could and set fire to it; the smoke, if not the heat, might keep them away.

When Crystheart and Darkflame suddenly appeared before the edge of the forest, clearly visible in the golden light of the long Avishraan sunset, it became disturbingly clear both that some of their enemies had wings and that mere physical barriers might not be enough to prevent them from entering the settlement.

Upon their arrival, Kedem stopped in mid-bellow, coughing with stunned surprise. All around Dwathnil, various groans and hisses of dismay erupted, along with a certain amount of harshly whispered conversation. “We should rush them-” “Clearly they're witches, it wouldn't matter if we outnumbered them a hundred to one-” “-drive us mad with words in our heads-”

If no one held a lid on it, there'd be either a charge or a retreat. And a retreat might be even deadlier than a charge; there was only the sea behind them, and the nearest settlement was many miles south

Dwathnil peered over the edge of the barricade, clutching his wood axe, trying to see their opponents through the smoke of the dwindling fires.

A light breeze stirred the two safir's excessively long manes — pale lavender in Crystheart's case and jet black in Darkflame's — causing them to dramatically billow behind the two elvenoids; it also drew out rills of milk from their busts. The shorter Crystheart, still unsheathe, shivered with pleasure, while Darkflame stood tall — well over seven feet, towering over even Crystheart, let alone the copydragons.

The skyscraping ravenne narrowed her piercing orange eyes, taking stock of the settlement and the takmar there settled. Slowly, she raised a hand to shoulder level and spread her wings wide, before directly transmitting her thoughts and emotions to the dragon-things.

Darkflame conveyed that her kind, the Ones Who Came From A Fallen(?) Paradise Beyond The Stars, were a peaceful people, and devoted themselves to the veneration of Nature in all vis forms. So it was, she continued, that they felt it necessary to intervene. The forest that separated their settlement was no mere grouping of trees; it was alive, and just as sapient as us or youse.

They — Darkflame, Crystheart, and their comrades — could feel the slow, necessarily introspective thoughts of the Mind-Tree, so had they named for themselves this world after it — and could feel that it was in pain from their destructive incursions into its physical manifestation, that being the dense forest behind them.

They could not abide, or allow themselves to abide, the dragon-things' slow slicing of the Mind-Tree. In lieu thereof, Darkflame, chieftess of their settlement, offered to help with finding alternative resources for the takmar, either in location or forme. Be that by them rejected, however, they were willing to defend with womanly firmness the Mind-Tree, which obviously could not defend itself.

All this she conveyed with more than enough sub- and context for the takmar to understand fully, such was the mode d'emploi of safir telepathy.

As if to prove their point, Darkflame cupped her inner hands and let her eyes & the tattoos that covered her skin like bodypaint glow with psionic might; a knot of bright white, stone-like material appeared, floating in her hands, and slowly grew to the size of a fist.

Crystheart's eyes began to glow as well, and she empathically pushed out a modicum, a tincture, of the Mind-Tree's pain, but no small measure, surely.

The takmar had no telepathic facility of their own, but they did have an empathic one. They were no strangers to the feelings of other beings. But they had, unaware though they were of it, evolved it as an aid in hunting, and in a number of ways it was the most sensitive in ways that would lead them to prey.

And while pain was certainly among these, they had utterly failed to pick up on that of the forest, which was diffuse and lacked the hot, sharp focus of an animal in pain. It might have been different had they been out in the middle of it, surrounded by it, instead of at its edges, but the situation was as it was.

Now, of course, in the face of the psionic communication, the pain was made manifest. As the communication ended, the takmar stared, dazed by the sight and the feeling of it.

The safir might have seen the confusion arising in the minds facing them. Beings from a paradise beyind the stars? Wings covered in… something like hair, but not hair (for winged safir were the only feathered creatures on this world)? The ability to speak into the mind? The ability to appear from nothing? Glowing lights? Were these witches? Strange, alien gods?

And the forest… sapient? Who had ever heard of sapient trees?

Dwathnil glanced aside at Kedem, who was still stunned. He felt it prudent to speak before she did; she was a decent organizer of work and materiel, but tact and diplomacy were not her strong suit. No one had expected them to be needed here. Gulping in unease and making I'll-handle-this motions in Kedem's direction, he edged his way out from behind the barricade and toward the strange beings.

“O matriarch of the star-people,” he began, addressing Darkflame in a voice that did not quite manage to conceal his terror, “We have no knowledge of thinking, feeling forests. We came across the sea, from a place where such things do not exist.” That we know of, he added silently, though he supposed that it was likely that the beings would hear it just the same.

“But wood is the material with which we build our homes and cook our food. We do not have the material here to build in stone or brick, and the weather is too wet for earthen homes. The ships that brought us here from the Inner Sea have gone back and may not return for many turns; and if we move elsewhere, they may not find us again and think us lost.

“And though we dared much in crossing over the Great Deep, we were all adults and could choose it freely. But there have since been children born here, and more yet to come, who we cannot risk in crossing back, lest the Devourer take them. What, then, would you have us do?”

Crystheart and Darkflame look silently but expectantly at each other for some moments. What's not immediately apparent to the takmar is that they're having a telepathic conversation with one another, poring over what they know about the area and thinking of a way forward that benefits all three parties — the safir, the takmar, and the Mind-Tree.

From time to time as this continues, they gesture with their four hands, their wings, or in Crystheart's case with vis member, to nothing in particular. It's clear that whatever is going on in their minds is rather profound, perhaps even contentious. Eventually, Darkflame tosses, without looking, the knot of mindstone to Dwathnil, before again sending telepathically to the takmar.

Darkflame conveys to the copydragons that there are several alternatives not too far distant. Their own data obtained before upon this world landing includes notations of a clay deposit that ]may] be reachable without disturbing or injuring the Mind-Tree, as well as peat in the nearby swamps, and non-sapient trees in the inland hills.

As for the feasibility of reaching those from the coast, she suggests that they beat a road between them, a task with which the safir would be willing to assist if they discontinue this quarrel. She also sends that the safir would teach them how to responsibly harvest and manage each of those resources, especially the trees.

As an addendum, Crystheart offhandedly mentions mindstone, the psychoplastic material that Dwathnil now holds in his claws, though disclaims that conjuring it ex nihilo in large quantities is not healthy for them.