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| Action Id: 4860 | Crisis: | Participants: Medeia | |
| Status: Resolved | Submitted: Dec. 10, 2023, 9:01 a.m. | Public: True | GM: Apostate |
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Action by Medeia
It's been quite the journey to this point. Pursuing magic has not been an easy task for the Arvani, and while some might look at Medeia's path and think it came easier than most - perhaps true - the lady knows how much time and sacrifice it has taken. Equal measures of boldness and caution, fear and delight, wondering and knowing. She's been blessed with mentors of broad interests and backgrounds, allowing her to find what resonates. She can't help but smile wryly about it being blood. It's always been blood, hasn't it? From mundane fertilization in her gardens to her work as a midwife, from that dress she sacrificed that had Orazio's blood on it to the development of the Bloodrite Against the Horned God.
And with Cynara, it all came tumbling out. A touch reckless, maybe, in her excitement to tell someone openly about her ideas and accomplishments. But the dragoness understood. Even encouraged her. With her eyes wide open, and the suggestion from Cynara to bridge the gap between alchemy and magic by adding a bit of her blood, Medeia has settled into her workspace with an array of things in front of her that could, under normal circumstances, create a balm that soothes burns. Under these circumstances? Well, there's a not-so-metaphorical threshold to cross, a dragoness keeping an eye on her in the workshop - having made it clear that she can't push Medeia across but can possibly help her stay the path, and a single-minded determination to see if she can make something pull the fire right out of burned skin.
Result
It does keep coming back to the blood.
Medeia has had noticeable success with alchemy as of late, arguably having a decisive role in saving the entire world from the Horned God with her contributions. But with alchemy, it always has felt a little like working off the recipe written by someone else, or trying to mix things and hope for trial and error and seeing what comes of it. It's experimentation, rather than an artisan trying to produce a work, or something that feels repeatable with the knowledge and understanding of what she's really doing.
So the time comes to try to seek that knowledge, as everything is coming to a head.
Meditation and alchemical experimentation, since sometimes it's a matter of looking inside, and it comes back to the blood. Occult tomes talk about vision quests, deep meditations, dreamwalks, or a dozen other names for going into a state and trying to unlock knowledge. The Nox'alfar helpfully sent along a similar tome with the title, 'Teaching Magic to Humans, A Children's Guide', though most of the descriptions and pictures look alarmingly dangerous such as 'cover oneself in spiders and enter a fugue state as the venom courses through them, the survivors really seem enlightened!'. But mixing blood with incense with a very particular rite? That might do. And so for not the first time, Medeia experiments, mixes her blood, inhales incense, meditates and begins to...
She's running.
She feels a bone deep terror as she's running through a stonehall way, with the sounds of explosions and screams around her. The designs and iconography of the rooms she runs through are familiar to her in a way that is impossible to place, though the word 'Uannan' comes unbidden through her mind. She's running, and she knows something is chasing her. Something huge, on great dark wings, the wingbeats sounding like a tornado coming closer and closer to her by the second. She can feel the heat from a blast of fire- not directed at her, but near enough that the smoke chokes and blinds, and she is still running and running and running.
She runs into another room, and the floor of the castle has collapsed, running to an edge that shows an inferno boiling down hundreds of feet below her. Behind her, the castle is falling apart. She has nowhere to go. A great black dragon is looming behind her, trying to find her with hate filled eyes.
She died here once.
It's closer now, and she is trapped. The great black dragon is flying directly above her, its cavernous maw waiting above. It's going to swallow her whole. Malar strikes like a serpent, and she jumps, the dragon's head snapping paste her and biting into the castle, swallowing rock and floor as she tumbles past, falling towards the inferno below.
She died here once. When she was a different person. In a different life. Time seems to slow, as she tumbles towards the inferno below her. The heat washes up at her, and her blood is on fire.
In that moment, she feels the deep connection in her blood. She's experimented with blood, so many times. Life force, essence, but there's always a hint of something more, a connection to something's soul in the blood, and she can feel just a part of Cynara in it as she falls. A part of a relationship that's spanned lifetimes. A part of her that mixes human and dragon souls, that feels a connection that even death can't sever. Human and dragon, as she falls. So very different, but in that moment, feeling everything in the blood...
Lady Medeia Saik is suspended above the inferno, floating. Connected by blood. And if dragons can fly, why can't she?
Medeia snaps out of the trance with a start, and she falls hard onto the floor below her. She had been levitating at least ten feet off the ground, and is bruised by the surprise rough flanding. But she can feel it inside herself now. A burning within her. A brand forged around her soul.
So she picks herself up, walks off the bruises and leaves the room. Walking out as Arvum's newest mage.