Wandering

Of the Elements

Entry #10

2nd of July, 08:31

Queen Chrysalis' camp, Lake Vale

941m ASL, Precipitation 6,1mm/h (sleet)

Temperature 2º C, Wind Speed 16 m/s S

What woke me up that morning was, most likely, any hiker's worst nightmare.

A biting cold wind found its way down my sleeping bag, and brought with it moist air that made my bones rattle. My first thought was that I'd probably taken off a few layers too many going to sleep; the second, however, hit me a moment later when a heavy, fat drop of sloshing half-liquid water impacted onto my improvised blindfold, and seeped through like a mass of crawling bugs.

It was raining.

I opened my eyes wide, immediately rushing awake for the second morning in a row. While that didn't give me much sight to speak of as I still had a t-shirt wrapped around my head, the awareness that waking came with deepened my insight and put it into a frighteningly detailed context.

It was raining – raining hard – the wind was hard and the air was almost freezing cold; I had no shelter, my rain gear was meager at best, and I had absolutely no idea where I was.

I tore the shirt off my head with a blubbering gasp as I struggled against the fabric for a moment, and eyed my surroundings with a frantic stare. The sparse vegetation of the clearing we'd set up camp in was whipped to the ground by wind and water, and the sleeping changelings looked almost like enormous moss-painted slabs of volcanic rock, undisturbed in their rest despite being completely soaked.

I dismissed the idea of waking them up after remembering Elytra's little speech about their temperature-resistant shells, and instead shifted my focus to my equipment. Luckily I'd kept the rain covering on my backpack up while flying, and never bothered to take it down with all the things that had happened yesterday; that little stroke of luck, at least, meant that there was at least some chance of my things being not entirely drenched. I had some electronics in there, too – I'd hate to see them broken, especially in a place like this where I sure as hell couldn't just go to the store and buy new ones.

With everything else accounted for, I pondered my course of action for a moment. Essentially, I had two choices. Curl up, get back to sleep and hope the best I could that the weather would relent before I froze to death, was one. All in all, it didn't seem like a very clever course of action, so I quickly settled for option number two.

Getting out of my sleeping bag would be a wet, messy business, and seeing as I'd slept on my rain jacket, I didn't have anything decently dry that could protect me from the weather's onslaught in the first place. In all essence, I was doomed to endure this blasted rain unless I found shelter – yeah, that was likely – or some other way of getting away from the weather. Looking upward for a moment crushed any hopes I had of it being just a small, local storm, however, and my spirits sunk down as if tied to a rock thrown off a mountain.

Something about that stray thought remained for a second round, though, and got me thinking. “Mountain. Mountain... a mountain!” I burst out. With those words out of my mouth, I realized exactly what had to be done – I just had to getabove the storm. Thankfully, those words coming back into my ears startled Elytra enough to rouse her from her own sleep, so I didn't have to spend time figuring out how to accomplish that part of the plan.

The feeling ofwaking up while you were already awake was, I admit, nothing like I'd expected. At first it was almost the same feeling as the one I'd had when we melded – like cold water flowing into my veins, spreading from that spot on my neck where Elytra somehow stored her body. Then it became a vague snowdrift of emotions, disorientation mixed with sleepiness, annoyance and thirteen other various trace elements of whatever dream she'd had before waking up. If changelings had dreams, that was, but that was a question for a later day. Right now, I had a storm to evade.

“Elytra, wake up,” I said with a sense of urgency; conveying subtleties was, thankfully, blessedly simple when speaking to someone inside your own head.

She gave me a rather girlish yawn in response – she seemed to have lost most of the rasp in her voice ever since we melded, and if I didn't know better I'd have sworn her behavior was becoming more and more...human. That wasn't possible, though – you didn't just up and become a different species entirely just from sitting in someone's head for a while. Surely, one did not.

Murphy's law being what it is, of course, I had to eat those words the very next moment.

The girlish yawn was quickly followed by the spot on my neck stirring like a boiling pot, before giving off a distinctpop and, to my immense surprise, disappearing. I felt it go, like a chunk of my own flesh just jaunting out of existence. In its place, a small, black cocoon manifested right before my eyes, and despite it being disconnected from my body I could feel it like it was part of it. The cocoon briefly burned with the green fire of changeling magic before opening.

I was expecting some form like what I'd seen from Elytra the previous day, shapes derived off her own hiveling body, to come out of it – all things counted, that's what the signs pointed to. Imagine my surprise when it instead revealed a fairy-like creature two hands tall; obviously human and female in shape, though reasonably changeling-colored with coal-black skin, two pairs of translucent wings and a mane of vivid green hair that stealthily draped itself around the curves and joints of her body. “Mmgoodmorning, Martin,” Elytra's new form said drowsily – without a single trace of rasp in her voice, or for that part echoing any of the words inside my head.

It was a pretty impressive development, and something I definitely had to speak to her about later – undoubtedly she'd been rummaging through my head quite a bit for reference, that much was clear enough – but even with how uncomfortable that made me feel, there were more pressing things to be dealt with than that.

“No, Elytra, it's not a good morning. It's the worst morning we could possibly have, in fact – well, I guess an outright thunderstorm would be a bit worse still, but anyway – we need to get out of this weather. Right now. Otherwise we have something like an hour or two before I freeze to death.”

That was a rather massive exaggeration, and she probably realized it as well – it was rather hard being dishonest to someone you literally shared your thoughts with. That same mechanic gave her the hard, true facts as well, however, and she was surely still able to feel what I felt in my own body still. The water had begun seeping in by now, and with it came the biting cold; and the moment I exposed my wet body to the winds, it would be a hundred times worse. The clock was ticking, without a doubt, and Elytra didn't have to spend much time to realize it.

“How?” was all she managed before another yawn cracked her tiny jaws, her wings fluttering erratically as she struggled to shake herself awake. She must've been working on her new form instead of sleeping, if she was this tired – that might've been what she was doing while I was being interrogated by Chrysalis, for one.

Thankfully, the solution I had in mind for my meteorological dilemma wasn't very hard to explain. “Fly above it. If we power your spell up a bit, we can easily gain altitude enough to breach these clouds, and fast.”

Elytra's eyes widened a bit at my proposition, but her acceptance of my plan was all but clear from what I felt from her. “I thought you said we weren't going to do that again?” She gave me a stern look – or at least tried to, but she wasn't quite up to par with Chrysalis in that department – and shook her head. “Never mind. Get dressed and gear up – I will inform her majesty.” And to my great surprise, she took off into the rain, leaving me wrapped up in my own cocoon while she went to wake the queen.

I was about to get a bit angry at her for running off like that – it was another delay to be had, and I didn't want to stay in this damn weather for a single moment longer than I had to – but the second I unzipped my sleeping bag and pulled it down to my waist, my wings sprouted like a jack-in-the-box, right where I sat. Immediately I wrapped them around me to stay warm – they were extremely effective windstoppers, even if they didn't do much against the rain – and noticed that she'd put a lot more work in them this time around. While the colors were the same, the feathers weren't long and spindly like a bunch of mutant peacock tails anymore; instead, they were a tightly woven mesh of fluffy down with clearly slotted primaries, much like an eagle's.

That only kept me distracted for a few seconds, though, as the rain swiftly worked its way through my freshly regrown limbs, resuming its chilling crusade against my body heat with the same ferocity as before. Shaking as much water as I could off my wings, I pulled off the rest of the sleeping bag and started to get dressed.

It wasn't a very comfortable process. My boots were soggy and wet, like everything else except the few things I'd kept in my pillow pack and actually slept on top of. Some of the magical properties of the wings allowed me to actually wear thingsthrough them – I'd experimented with that yesterday, but it still felt fairly weird to put on a shirt in slow-motion like you were forcing it through a vat of syrup – but they made the process a bit more drawn-out than I'd expected. It didn't take much more than a minute or two before I was all suited up, however, and just as I snapped on the clips of my backpack I spotted Chrysalis looming over towards me, flanked by Elytra's hovering shape.

The changeling queen let out a loud yawn as she walked up to me – she'd stayed up later than me, and I was fairly sure she needed more sleep than I did anyway, so that wasn't much of a surprise – and tried her best to fixate me with her half-lidded, sleepy eyes. “Mmm...Martin. Why are you...up at this hour. Go to sleep.” Were it not for the cascading rain keeping her green mane straight as a taut rope, I swear she'd have had the most epic bedhead ever. Mornings werereally not Chrysalis' favorite time of day.

I rolled my eyes at her statement, and gave her a sideways look as I started going through the little pre-flight checklist I'd made for myself yesterday. “I'm up at this hour because, in case you haven't noticed, it'sraining like hell. And unlike some of the species in this bloody world, mine actually runs a danger of freezing to death in conditions like these. So no, I prefer staying awake, thank you very much. I'm going to fly up above this storm until the worst of it blows off, and there will be no further arguing about it.” Looking over to the second humanoid in attendance I added, “Elytra, power us up. Also, I'd get in if I were you – I don't know how well that new form of yours can keep up when we start ascending.”

My companion gave me a quick nod and – in a rather comical fashion – planted herself on my head, before starting to fire up the levitation magic. That was a process I'd become rather familiar with by now. A series of set emotional states – I was fairly sure that's what they were, at least – rushed through Elytra's mind like a computer program going through lines of code, before finally the sensation of near-weightlessness settled in and her feelings returned to normal. I gave my wings a few testing flaps, before checking the straps on my backpack one last time to make sure everything was fastened properly.

For some reason, Chrysalis hadn't realized she had second thoughts until the very last moment. “Wait! Don't-”

I decided, however, that I'd had just about enough of feeling like a drenched puppy in a fridge for one day. With all the strength my legs and wings could muster, I thrust off the ground. Moments later I tore into the gray mass of clouds like a living bullet, and the world became a blur before my eyes.

Well, most of it, anyway.

Chrysalis had evidently worked out the magic of going really fast as well, because she was following a short distance below me, her wings moving too fast for my eyes to see. “Martin! Listen to me!” I could barely hear her voice, but through Elytra I could sense immense waves of fear and urgency radiating from the queen, which mirrored itself in my companion's own feelings. I couldn't help but worry, but there wasn't much I could do about the situation at the speed I was going – except try to slow down as safely as I could, which would undoubtedly be a long and tedious process.

I didn't have to decelerate much before Chrysalis caught up to me, however, and I was quite happy to keep up my ascent. We had definitely covered some distance judged by the fact that I was starting to make out the sun above, but we were still surrounded by a thick, wet mass of rainclouds emptying their contents all over us. Stopping wasn't an option quite yet. “Is this really the best time to talk!?” I yelled across the airspace separating us, gesturing as wildly as I could to make sure I got things across. Which probably wasn't necessary due to the whole Changeling Mind Reading or whatever thing they have going, but I didn't care much at that point. There had to be some sort of reason for her following me on this mad dash skyward, and I was going to have it.

Did I mention how easy it is to get across subtleties to changelings?

“You have the Mercury Star in your bag! It's dangerous to expose it to magic! We have no idea what it can do! Get downimmediately!”

Naturally, the bloody thing chose to wait until that very moment to do something. Before I even was able to come up with a witty reply I felt a massive surge of energy from behind my head, and the world was enveloped in an intense burst of azure light.