8: Titan's Awakening

Leiyn rode Steadfast hard across the land. 

The hills and forests flew by in a dizzying blur. She followed paths that she'd trod over a hundred times before, each root and stone and pitfall familiar. She knew where to urge the stallion to leap over a small ditch, where the crossings lay in the intervening streams and rivers. 

This was her home, her solace. She'd lived nowhere else that had resonated with her like the Titan Wilds, the untamed lands of the Tricolonies. She'd grown up in a town with her father and had spent a brief period in a children's shelter in the largest city of Baltesia, Southport. But only here had her spirit soared, finally free.

Now Gasts—and Jaguars, no less—intruded upon it. 

And she couldn't stop them.

As the wind lashed her eyes to tears and low-hanging limbs threatened to knock her from Steadfast's back, she worked through how they might have done it. She'd heard of forgers who lived in Southport, but the barriers a Gast would have to overcome to procure such a document seemed impossible to navigate.

She couldn't believe the alternate explanation, either. Gasts never told the truth, in her experience. Why would one of the Caelrey's conquerors give the tribespeople leave to travel through the colony?

Frustration seared her, hot as the Lodge's hearths on a winter night. Had Gasts not prowled nearby, she would have screamed with the fury of it. Instead, she had to hold it in, though it roiled and rumbled like a kindling volcano. Her rage brimmed from her, overflowing, erupting.

She couldn't contain it.

As her mahia's walls crumbled, the woods all around her grew unnaturally bright. A wash of sensation struck Leiyn dumb for a moment. Steadfast, a fountain teeming with life, felt like raw flames where their bodies touched, clothes posing no barrier to the sorcerous connection. The stallion seemed just as startled by the touch, and the horse stuttered to a halt, panting in silent protest.

But she wasn't listening any longer, preoccupied instead by her lifesense, for she and her wrath weren't the brightest things burning in these woods. Something else stirred, something that possessed Gast magic as well, and at a scale she could scarcely comprehend. Even though it was far away, beyond the hills and forest she journeyed through, it burned hot enough that distance seemed to make little difference. She sensed it like the smell of sulfur, the bite of the smoke in her throat, the heat of flames on her skin.

Leiyn erected the barest protections before the ash dragon's eruption flowed through her.

She reeled under the onslaught, her balance pitching like a ship in a storm. She barely clung to the saddle as the awakening assaulted her. The sensation resembled a burst of scalding air, only it forced its way into her very essence.

"Wolf's piss," she hissed. She hunched closer to Steadfast's head, his life's presence more comforting than disturbing now, and tried to raise her mental barriers once more. 

But neither the horse nor her walls could protect her from this. Though she didn't think it was an intentional attack, the searing wind was unrelenting and insistent. Billowing with a strength she couldn't hope to match, it ate away at her feeble fortifications.

The esse of the rising titan roared in.

Leiyn squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her fists into tight knots as the battery continued. That it would dissipate soon was little comfort. A titan like this ash dragon only radiated their spirit this strongly when they first roused from their long slumbers.

To stay above the fiery flow, she focused on her other perceptions. The feel of her clothes, dewy from the ride, as they clung to her skin. The faint, cool wind brushing against her face. The sounds of the rustling leaves filling her ears. The vague discomfort of the hard leather saddle under her rump.

She grounded herself in her senses, and slowly, as the burning wind abated, she pried her attention away from her lifesense. Her walls rose, and her mahia became blind once again.

Prying open gummy eyes, Leiyn wiped at her face with a sleeve, disregarding the dirt she smeared across it. For several moments, she could only hunch over, breathe deeply, and attempt to rein in her galloping pulse.

"Cow's tits, I hate titans," she muttered. "But no use in sobbing over dropped eggs, eh, Steadfast?"

Despite her words, she turned her head toward where she'd last sensed the titan. Her path had taken her up a rise, and through a gap in the trees, she could see the Silvertusk Sierra rising over the landscape. One of its peaks, Nesilfo, the Clouded Fang, was red with lava. Even leagues away and thousands of feet above, it was a clear enough day that the jagged mountain was plain to see. The lava contrasted with the ice and snow that had claimed the apex before.

Above the mountain soared the ash dragon.

The titan took a slow turn through the air on wings formed from the lava's noxious fumes. Its body was long and sinuous, and it undulated as it moved through the blue sky. As the smoke and ash that made up its head parted, it formed a mouth lined with long, sharp teeth. The rumbling of the mountain was its roar, the spurts of lava, its fire.

But the esse within it burned hotter than any volcano.

Leiyn watched the titan circle above the mountain in an endless loop. Experience told her it would continue to do so for several hours before it settled back into its craggy peak for another years-long slumber. For now, it burned with unmitigated power that spread across the wilderness. Nothing that possessed the lifesense could ignore an awakened titan.

Why these spirit beasts acted as they did, no one knew. But watching one, feeling its presence… even as it opened her cursed magic, observing titans was as close to wonder as Leiyn ever felt.

With a start, she realized she'd inadvertently lowered her mahia's walls once more and exposed her lifesense to feel the ash dragon more strongly. She scowled and snapped them back into place.

Remember the cost, she told herself. Never forget it.

But no matter how many times she killed the temptation, it always came back. And the more vehemently she denied it, the more the opposing thoughts intruded.

What if I accepted it? Gathered all the broken pieces of myself and stitched them together? What if I didn't hide my mahia as a secret shame, but wielded it as a weapon?

Yet to even consider such was to spit in the eye of Omn. Embracing Gast magic went against all the teachings of the Saints and the Catedrál. Mahia had only ever harmed her and those she loved. It was a vile thing, through and through. 

She knew it was the truth. She only hoped that someday she would accept it.

Her thoughts triggered a different realization that nearly had her digging her heels into Steadfast's sides. A titan's awakening. Gast magic. It couldn't be a coincidence that an ash dragon had arisen so soon after she'd run across the Gasts—and Gasts with a shaman among them. She knew, as every Baltesian did, that Gasts had the power to command titans.

That the shaman had awoken one now could only mean one thing.

War. War has returned to Baltesia.

Leiyn sucked in a shaky breath as she contemplated it. She'd thought the Jaguars portended a mere raid, their writ be damned. But if she was correct, if this titan's awakening was an omen of worse things to come, it was more critical than ever that she intercept the Gasts. How many warriors would follow on their heels? How many shamans would awaken titans to destroy Baltesia and the rest of the Tricolonies?

Yet even as the terrible hypothetical threatened to freeze her mind into rigid conclusions, she knew it was only one possible scenario. It remained conceivable, however remotely, that the writ was legitimate, the Gasts innocent, and the titan's awakening was a happenstance. Or, if they were raiding, that it was an isolated incident. 

Whatever the truth, she couldn't parse it out in the forest. She had to return to the Lodge; any possible answers awaited her there.

She spared one last look for the ash dragon and lava-riven Nesilfo. It was a ranger's duty to report on the activities of titans. The great spirits distorted the shape of the landscape when they rose from their slumbers. With every awakening, titans demonstrated the wilderness had been aptly named. They, of all the creatures found across the Veiled Lands, most profoundly disrupted the landscape and its inhabitants. When awake, they left a trail of destruction wherever they roamed, be they a hill tortoise trampling a forest, a tempest hawk blighting a hillside with lightning, or a river serpent flooding a river and its surrounding lowlands—to make no mention of what a titan that appeared near a town might do.

But the intentional awakenings of more titans would do far more damage than leaving this one unreported. She had to alert the Lodge to the danger.

Steadfast danced beneath her, eager to be off. Leiyn pressed her heels and urged him on, hoping she wasn't already too late.

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