Rain Harlow
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(Vol 5) Chapter 58: A Fateful Cup of Tea
🕑 Added 2024-07-03 14:39:37 +0000 UTC109 Followers gained. That is pretty awesome for a day. Too bad my promo bonus is gone. Oh well, at least I still have modifiers to exp gains, and that’s the important thing! Faith Energy is pretty well-covered right now.
Her Specialized FE was at the minimums she wanted, but she figured she might as well bump them again to 200 each over the next day for additional cushion.
Sammy noticed that Ash was active and Estara was just arriving at The Farm in Caneboro, so she switched over to the Green Avatar to meet Estara at the door. Giving her a hug and a kiss on the cheek that made her blush, Sammy hurriedly and gleefully took her up to the room Ash was using so they could meet.
Ash rose from her studies at a table as they entered, her gothy look still on her. The two Daughters of Fate stared at each other. There was some intuitive connection immediately. The whole room seemed to have a new charge to it with them together.
“Ash,” Sammy said with a smile, rocking up on her toes, “this is Estara. Estara, this is Ash. You may not have met in this life, but you have met before.”
Blinking, Ash nodded slowly as she studied Estara curiously. “Yes.” She dropped her disguise with a wave of her hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Estara. I am sure there is much we will accomplish together.”
Estara grinned and curtsied. “A pleasure to meet you as well, Ash. You are very naturally beautiful, if I may say so.”
“You may. A cruel beauty, though, wasted and denied to others for other obsessions. And you are very pretty, too. Adorable, really. It would be easy to adopt you as a little sister.”
Sammy laughed. “She gets that a lot.”
Estara blushed slightly. “I am sure that it is inevitable, Ash, despite that we’ve just met. I suspect we’ll be apart for a while if the news holds that you are to venture to Gierkos.”
Ash nodded once, her hands clasping behind her back. “Simple necessity. As a former Dominion deep agent, I would be a liability here for the near future, and I can practice my arts much more freely there.”
They made quite a contrast, the two, between the hard demeanor of Ash and the softness of Estara. Despite her beauty, Ash put almost zero effort into it, and even her features had a cold, precise angularity to them. Her chosen clothes were quality but nearly of a militant style, with pants underneath her skirts.
Estara, meanwhile, was all girly-girl despite being in her travel dress. In truth, she was significantly less soft than she had once been, growing leaner with more muscular definition than in her servant-girl days.
Samantha clapped her hands together suddenly. “Let’s have tea, shall we?”
Soon they were all sitting at a cleared-off table and partaking of some conjured, almost-like-Tashome’s herbal tea, Sammy in particular enjoying a few quiet moments together with them. The Fortuneteller was definitely there, radiating her presence silently and moreover absorbing that moment as a special one. For an entity composed of many tragic lives of failure, these sorts of things were particularly therapeutic.
Let’s not think about it too hard, though. Once I start focusing on my hypothetical failure as seen from their future perspective as another me, shit will get really weird.
Ash was squinting in thought with her tea held in her hand. “I feel it.”
“Feel what?” Estara asked.
Ash nodded over to the ‘empty’ spot.
“Mmmn.” Estara was nodding vehemently in understanding as she took a sip.
“We’ve done this before, with another.”
“And we’ll do it again, with the same.”
Sammy grinned widely. “Sometimes two others, isn’t it?”
Ash appeared confused, but Estara brightened and exclaimed, “Azure! She should be here!”
Laughing, Sammy shook her head. “I did say sometimes, didn’t I? She doesn’t like tea quite like we do. Also, she is… strangely shy about you lot recently. She wants everyone together and apparently to make her ‘special dessert.’ Her instincts are uncanny because she doesn't even have the specific memory of this thing we shared, yet reverse-engineered from the taste to figure it out.”
“A special dessert?” Ash was super primed and interested. “What could it be? A pastry, for sure.”
Sammy shrugged, unable to answer.
Meanwhile, Estara was squinting hard. Suddenly, her eyes went wide and she smiled big. “I think I know what it is!”
“What?” “What?!” Sammy and Ash both asked with burning curiosity.
Estara’s mouth opened, and then she blinked and hesitated. “Ooooh, I don’t think Azure would want me to say, though…”
“Now that’s just cruel,” Sammy admonished.
Ash took a sip of her tea and gave a cool glare Estara’s way. “If I was here longer, I bet I could find a way to obtain the information from you.”
Estara gulped audibly as her eyes flashed between them. “Aw, come on, please don’t be like this! You know she’d be heartbroken if the surprise was spoiled!”
Sammy quirked an eyebrow. “So what, you’re going to pretend to be surprised? How is it different?”
“At least some people would be! And I’ve been taught very well by you and your order how to lie, cheat, pretend, and act. So yes, Mother- I mean, Madam. I’ll pretend and she’ll be none the wiser. Er, unless she’s listening right now?”
Smiling at the ‘Mother’ slip, Sammy shook her head. “She’s not listening, Daughter. But this is Azure you’re talking about, and it's you you’re talking about, trying to fool someone you know.”
Estara’s chin rose slightly. “I don’t know what you mean. I can fool whoever I want to.”
“I’ll take that bet,” Ash said, staring over her teacup with an intense, somehow predatory gaze. “A cooked dinner. You can cook, hmm? I’ll bet you a cooked dinner you can’t fool her.”
“Of course I can cook, but…” She cut short, clearing her throat and staring back at Ash. “You know what? You’re on! I hope you’re good with spices. I like spicy stuff.”
Ash made a subtle shrug, holding a tiny smile, but said nothing.
“A sucker’s bet,” Sammy commented.
“You tell her, Mother!” Estara said, clearly misinterpreting the meaning.
“In any case, I’m sure my Blueberry will slurry up something divine with how much she seems to have been obsessing over it. She was going on and on about her various ‘food visions’ as we were relaxing in Heaven by the lake. Honestly, I was half-listening, half-dozing, or maybe I’d know more about this specialty.”
Ash shook her head with a bit of wonder. “A lake in Heaven. I can scarcely believe the things I’ve stumbled into after the life I led.”
“Come to think, Daughter, you can probably go there with Estara sometime since you are certainly capable of spirit projection by your own means.”
She seemed a bit stunned at the idea, but Ash nodded. “Correct.”
Estara clapped her hands and bounced excitedly. “Ooh, I can’t wait! I’ve been meaning to. Let’s make sure to do it together, Ash!”
“As you wish, Estara.”
“Do you think we can call each other Sister, eventually? Or even… Sis? I miss my natural sisters so much. But that’s what it is to grow up and leave home, huh? And I don’t want to endanger them by getting them wrapped up in this dangerous life. In some ways, it’s like you become a ghost of who you were, you know?”
Ash studied Estara only briefly before replying. “I do know. And let us utilize the title immediately. S-Sister. It’s only logical.”
Estara smiled in pleasure. “Awesome! Sis.”
Ash’s eyes shifted away. “I wonder about some of the events that have occurred in relation to this organization, and how much of the information we received about them was accurate…”
A quite sudden communication jarred the peace and quiet Sammy was enjoying, as Ba Ra thrust herself into Sammy’s mind. “Your Majesty Samantha, Zadkiel insisted I contact you about a problem matter of importance.”
Sammy made an apologetic face to the other two present and tapped her temple significantly as she rose and walked away a step. To Ba Ra, she sent back, “Alright, but this had better be good, Queen Phony.”
“Dreixia, who leads a strong clan that many others followed to Dominion lands, has somehow recovered. Enough to be a problem, at least. As you may remember, she was grievously injured by the Sage of Truth’s entropic blade. She fell into a near stupor, muttering incoherently, and has been half-carried during the retreat and half-able to follow along. But she’s snapped out of it, and that has turned out to be a very bad thing. She’s furious, bloodthirsty, and as forceful as ever.
“She’s rallied a worrying number of troops to stop retreating and fortify the fortress of Prie Moraan, largely at a rocky choke point before Twin Wells. Though conventionally defensible and reinforced against earth magic, there is very little hope of them resisting the versatile wizardry of the Dominion. If the numbers were smaller, it might technically be worth the stalling effect and attrition, but Draexia has commanded every living Naugite to occupy it.
“The majority have not listened to her, but this is perhaps seventy percent of the forces and Dreixia has convinced many powerful champions to join her vendetta. Zadkiel and I know this to be either a conscious or subconscious desire to… go out with a bang? She knows she is doomed and her salient days are numbered. For a Naugite hero, a death like this is preferable to torturously dragging it out and deteriorating.”
Sammy sighed. “A shame she has to drag everyone else down with her. What’s the plan?”
“That’s the issue. We don’t have a good solution. Assassination is one play, but not only are we hamstrung on capabilities and might fail — the likelihood of it being concluded by her clan to have been us to do it will ruin our uses for them to begin with. At that point, they might as well die there anyway.”
“Tch. I can count on you to be mercilessly cold and calculating, can’t I?”
A mental shrug. “Yes. And as the cherry on top of problems, Deikmorn’s closest clan guardsmen have seized on the opportunity to join Dreixia. He remains unconscious and unresponsive, and they were almost ready to leave him in the dust as a mercy to the indignity. This now allows them more face-saving for such a legendary clan hero. If they all die at the fortress's last stand, it’s technically in battle, and believable fabrications can be made about their heroic end.”
“Hmm. So Deikmorn is important?”
“There is no way they’ll remain at all without him or his brother. His brother won’t leave him. He may be doing it intentionally so his clan does survive. He’d largely be bound to fight on and remain for his brother’s last purpose and enemy. The surviving likely leaders would not be, and leave.”
“Seems like a miracle Zadkiel managed to navigate all these convoluted alliances and customs.”
“He had help. Anyway, you’ve been informed.”
Sammy found her brows furrowing. “What? You aren’t asking me for something?”
“Zadkiel insisted I run it by you, though I told him there was nothing you could do.”
Her furrowed brows became a frown with her hands on her hips. “Oh really? Well, maybe Zadkiel is more right about things than you are, sometimes. How about that?”
“It’s highly unlikely. Are you suggesting you have a plan?”
“You’re damn right I do!”
She scrambled for a plan.
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« (Vol 5) Chapter 57 | Table of Contents | (Vol 5) Chapter 59: A Dark Queen's Maiden Voyage »
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Comments
Rain Harlow
She considers this (more or less) next chapter. !!! Spoiler: As hard to believe as it is, it's aaaactually been less than 48 hours on the cooldown for Channel Domain, which is currently needed for anything super permanent. That mega up-jumps the typical hierarchy of 'cleanse' capabilities. I did verify this, but you can know from there being only two 'Daily gains.' The cleanse happened in a morning, Daily at evening (10-12 hours-ish), another Daily very recently (total 34-36 hours), gotta wait until morning to use it. Aaand... a choice between Dreixia or Deikmorn... hrm. Note also that mortals have more problems with 'already done damage' than deities, as they kinda need those pesky bodies under most circumstances. Red's damage is mostly memory loss, a lot of which happens anyway from the World Spell debuff. Trauma as well, but she is tough, tough nut. Certainly plan to cover more days next book! I think I'll just use a synonym for 'Expansion' as a title... lol.
Tejing
Shouldn't she be able to cure them? They are suffering from an Entropy effect if I understood correctly.
