The body of the fire dragon lay in the cavern, though Daisy was hard-pressed to say whether it was cooling or whether its internal fires were slowly consuming it. Her intention had been safe passage, but the drake had not been agreeable, one thing led to another, and then her dragon staff misfired and dropped a short ton of ice on its head. There would doubtless be consequences to that, but leaving her actions behind her had been what had brought her to the dragon’s cave in the first place.
The portal was obvious, a transition from the brown ice of Jupitre’s floating icelands to the dark gray basalt of… she supposed it would be Marz. The ways of dragons were a mystery, the portals between planets less so with the dawning age of soulcery, but Daisy didn’t have the time to commission a portal from a painter who had been off planet. So far as she knew, nobody had been off planet, giving dragons the monopoly on portals. And for whatever reason, dragons kept one portal to the adjacent planet at either end of the planet they were on.
The mural was lovely; large enough to admit a dragon, it portrayed a cavern unlike the one she was in, lit with burning natural gas jets. Like any true work of soulcery, it was manifestly a perfection of the art involved: in this case oil painting. She wasn’t certain whether the flickering of the jets was a trick of the light, or a natural aspect of the murals. Soulcery wasn’t her specialty; she was a Bachelor geometer but hardly up to the task of working magic with numbers.
But she was woolgathering, and more to the point she was dithering. It was a momentous decision, leaving Jupitre, but she supposed the choice had long since been made. Still, it was one thing to make up your mind, another to accidentally kill a dragon, and yet a third thing to actually step through—
Daisy stepped through the portal. Her first impression was of the curious lack of any sensation involved in doing so, she had supposed that there would be some indication she had stepped into an oil painting, the second that of overwhelming heat. She had studied what fragmentary knowledge survived from the Age of Loss, and the refraction by light sphere sorcerers, and had dressed for Marz’s substantially warmer climate. She wore a wide-brim hat with a high crown, loose balloon-sleeved v-neck shirt, baggy long pants gathered at the ankle, and buttoned pockets—you couldn’t wear and therefore couldn’t buy any other kind on Jupitre—adorning a long, loose, light vest. All of them were a shade of green which complimented her emerald eyes, and stood out vibrantly against her prematurely white hair. The sole articles she’d kept from her Jupitre wardrobe were her heavy brown leather shoes, spiked for traction and durable enough to traverse rocky terrain.
Her clothes, of course, were of fabrics which could be wetted and dried, and as sweat broke out on her skin she summoned water with an act of will, dousing herself and her clothes. She had practiced the maneuver before leaving home, but it was considerably more difficult on Marzian soil. It made sense, Marz was the fire planet, the planet of the element diametrically opposed to Daisy’s sorcery. Still, if she experienced such difficulty, she wondered how apprentice sorcerers even began their work with the element. She supposed they must make an investiture of the element, and begin their work with manipulating existent pools of water.
The jets of natural gas lit a cavern as expansive as the one she had spelunked to get to the portal. It was, as so many pre-Loss relics were, built to draconic scale. Expensive works of silver and gold abounded, and Daisy almost lamented that she was no thief, even from a dead dragon, for there was more wealth in the main cavern alone to pay for dozens, if not hundreds, of withdrawals from the Repositorium of Knowledge. Not that she would patronize such a dubious institution, simply that it was an easy reference for absurd expenses not worth themselves. She thought she saw daylight if she continued forward, so she ignored the side rooms likely containing only more appeals to draconic covetousness and entered the next cavern.
Dominating the room, there was a massive construct of metal on wheels, in two parts. The one she approached first was simply a cylinder on a metal bed, towards the back of the cavern. The other was rectangular, with vents along the top, and it was coated in frost despite the heat, a clear indicator of the use of fire brands. There were steps into the leading car, but Daisy elected not to meddle with a device she did not understand and walked past, and out of the cavern.
With no real notion of where she was going, Daisy elected to follow the rails which had emerged from under the presumable vehicle. Rails were an investment of time, energy, and effort, so presumably these led somewhere. Shielded by her hat, she peered at the orb of Heaven, trying to judge the time of day. Going by the crick in her neck, it was close to noon, which meant she’d know whether the sun set in the west or the east by end of day. That was a comforting notion to a woman whose life had been devoted to the measurement of space for the last four years. One final note she made was the angle at which the cavern’s mountain home rose from the peak of her staff, a reflexive consideration.
There was little in the way of vegetation—no, there was nothing in the way of vegetation, which made sense when you considered the lack of water on the fire planet. There were, however, any number of interesting geographic features, even if they were obscured by heat distortion. Craters adorned the landscape like raindrops on a pane of glass. Distant mountains loomed where they weren’t obscured by walls of pure flame. Even contemplating those fires, Daisy reached for her sorcery again to douse herself with water.
She was suspicious that a fire dragon had guarded this portal because it was located somewhere inhospitable to regular mortal life. It explained the lack of open cabin in the transport she had observed back in the cave; they would rely upon the secondary effect of the fire runes to keep the cabin at a bearable temperature. She wondered idly what all that flame was for, when the surrounds were already so hot.
The trek went on for some time, and Daisy wondered if she shouldn’t have investigated the transport after all. At least with the orb of Heaven having set and the stars being out, she knew she could reckon time much as she would have on Jupitre. The sun set in the west, and she was traveling north. Presumably, that was away from the equator, as she couldn’t imagine people settling somewhere she found bearable only with repeated applications of water sorcery to cool herself.
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She looked back and saw the mountain range she had emerged from much reduced in scale, and her geometer’s mind had her planting her dragon staff on the ground and using the etchings on its side to gauge distance. She was no light sorcerer, but she had learned a trick from her mentor amongst the Unchained. Holding a sphere of conjured water, she directed her focus inward, towards her spirit. She was no saint, but the water shone with an inner radiance reflecting the alignment of her soul with the One God.
By its light she made a quick comparison to the mountain’s previous elevation, and judged she had been walking perhaps nine hours. Even for a fit young woman, that was a bit much, in her opinion. It was night, anyway, and she didn’t relish walking on the rails in the dark. Moving enough to one side to avoid any vehicular accident, she laid out a collapsible envelope filled with water to soften the stony ground. Not having anticipated a long trip so much as a need for funds, she had more silver than food, but she did have some of the latter and ate the simple fare gladly and was quickly asleep.
The dawn awoke her, and she set out once more for… well, wherever she was headed. There were, at least, no attempts on her life in the night, which suggested her migration to Marz had yet to be traced by her enemies. Perhaps they feared to tread the ground of a planet closer to the orb of Heaven. She shook her head; women and men such as those held nothing sacred. Then, too, they had made a thorough mockery of her before her departure, perhaps she was a solved matter. Wishful thinking, women and men such as those also held grudges as she held the sacred. Daisy made the sign of the God-Star, fingers splayed over her heart, and uttered a brief prayer apologizing for judging others and asking for the intercession of the Virtue of the Mother, who bore wisdom in matters of wrath.
The sun was high in the sky before she saw what was definitely a city skyline and not more heat distortion, and it was midafternoon before she approached a high arched building built out of whitewashed stone. Initially, she had taken it for another distant lake of fire reaching over a hill, for reasons she would realize as she got closer. Her first impression of the city she approached was of whitewashed walls and even greater heat distortion above its skyline. One building stood closest to the rails, and it was this building she approached. Thick columns and sloping walls were adorned with platforms and cubbies, and from them stared statues.
Gargoyles, once she resolved them from the distance, stared down from on high, their hideous faces each individual and surely enough to frighten away even the most intrepid of demons. Even a brief inspection revealed all manner of curved or spiraling horns, long forked tongues pouring from sharp-toothed maws gaping to admit the Enemy and his hosts in a single bite. Hands more resembling claws dangled over knobby knees or goat-like haunches, and what lacked bat-like wings possessed thagomizers.
Bands of what appeared to be copper lined the building, and the entire roof from wall to peak burned with a constant fire. When Daisy stepped through the arch admitting the rails, she realized the purpose of the metal bands and the fire on the roof. It was actually quite clever, and she felt a hopeful admiration for the people of Marz. The fire on the roof must be rune branded; the heat from the fire would rise, while the heat in the conductive copper bands would be drawn out to fuel the fire, and the bands would draw the heat of the building they were wrapped around. The result was an interior cool enough to be livable. The whitewashed stone would practically be an afterthought, the white paint reflecting the light of the sun.
Inside the building was a high ceiling, another more natural means of encouraging a cool interior, and curiously more gargoyles. Surely, they were a faithful people to devote so much time and artistry to the banishment of evil. Stout square columns reached for the roof, but it appeared from their angle that the walls themselves were load-bearing, likely to accommodate the weight of the copper bands and roof. Small windows would be of benefit in such a hot climate, glass or open space readily admitting heat. She hadn’t seen any trees in her trek into town, and so assumed that bleached and resined wood was simply not an option available. Then, too, such a thing would be flammable, and they clearly put great stock by their flame brand cooling for their building, ominous though the look was.
There were tanks to either side of the rails, and to one side several people built along stocky, stolid lines. Their skin was tanned, their hair short or worn in queues, and they wore trousers in light shades such as cream and light gray, and leather vests over bare or white-shirted chests. Like her, they wore hats, though theirs bore dips in the crown and narrower brims. She greeted them with a cheerful wave and an inquiry as to where she was, which was met with stony silence and what she couldn’t help but find slightly hostile stares. There was, she noted with some chagrin, no getting around inconspicuously to judge by the workers in the hall. It seemed likely they were there to operate the massive pumps which led to the tanks, and Daisy realized that the rear car of the vehicle she had seen so curiously coated in frost was likely used to transport water.
Daisy hesitated as she took her next few steps, then elected to proceed confidently as though she walked on foreign soil every day of her life. A few hostile stares were nothing next to assassins and other servants of the Lord of Lies. She tried another simple greeting, but the only reply she got was a word she made out as “water” in the inquisitive. She shook her head, and silence once again hung heavily in the expansive room. Giving it up as a lost cause, something about the exchange nagging at her, she strode towards the smaller doors opposite the archway she had entered by. They did not appear to lock or possess knobs, simply swinging outward, although there was a second set likely intended to keep heat from entry or cool from escaping. The gaping hole to admit the railed vehicle was the greatest flaw in this grand design, but perhaps she had missed shutters to be brought down and her exchange with the dragon had disrupted a scheduled delivery.
Galvanized by the notion that Waterborne cultists might be proceeding after her even now for the unintentional—though likely inevitable—death of their patron, she strode into the sparsely-populated streets. Looking at the signs, many were visually evocative placards, but she realized she was unable to read the native language. That was a problem. Thinking back to her interactions with the working hands in the tank building, she realized she might not have a common tongue at all with the people of Marz. Still resolved to her course of action, she strode down the streets, smiling and nodding at those she passed, still receiving stony glares in response. The creams and grays of the pump workers, coupled with the brown of undyed leather predominated, and Daisy got more than a few stares of disbelief or amazement at her bright green attire. If plants were as scarce as water, she optimistically thought that perhaps there simply wasn’t an industry of making dyes, and she was not offending the sensibilities of the people she passed. Only time would tell.
