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Message: <blockquote data-quote="StalkingBlue" data-source="post: 1649528" data-attributes="member: 645">Alliance The Witch starts up, gasping.  The third time tonight.  The dreams come ever more frequent – and this time, it was very near.  ***A lake, an ice film, fragile enough to shiver in the winter wind;  yet unpierceable by the Witch spirit who flutters, tiring yet too intrigued to give it up.  A burst.  Ice, water and fish scales scatter as a feathered shape rises, sharp blue piercing the pale blue sky.  Ice Phoenix.  The slim little blue bird with its prey of fatfish flits past her, oblivious.  Below on the thinly-iced lake, the shadow of an enormous crane wheels away royally.  ***The Witch shakes herself fully awake.  Not again? Spirits intruding upon your dreams, my dear.  Too much mushrooming.  After this long absence, the taste of freshly cut mushroom.  The colours of the True, undiluted by distance or age or dust.  It has been exhilarating, yes:  dangerously so.  But … a mortal spirit?  It has taken many repetitions of this dream for her to be sure that was what Ice Phoenix is.  A disappointment at first to realise that – a person in her own right that one is, not one that would need a Witch to visit the Pale.  Disappointment;  then, when the dreams kept coming and closing in on her, worry.  Pursuers?  Hakemon?  Mongali?  A renegade Forest Witch?  You are growing paranoid.  Too much time with Eastern thinkers does that.  The Witch sits and ponders.  Stars wheel.  The Forest of Beskarn whispers around her.  As is bound to happen when thoughts insist on being thought when it is time to be sleeping, no solution presents itself.  Instead, a root persistently pokes into her lower back.  So finally, annoyed and sleepy, the Witch rolls her shoulders and curls up into bat shape, to fly up into the ancient blood oak and hang down and try to finally perhaps get some sleep.  ***A grumpy, dream-shaken bat wakes just as the first sunlight fingers its way down the tips of the treetops.  Below crouches a white splotch of a figure.  The bat blinks to clear her day sight, reaches for concentration, reassures herself of a mostly-full arsenal of spells.  Considers the intruder.  A human, female.  Shirt, sandals and trousers in the square cut typical of the Heavenly Mountains:  in death white.  No weapons.  Yet muscled, the loose readiness of a warrior.  Oblivious of the observer hanging upside down above her, she’s rewinding a length of frayed, ancient cloth around her left hand with slow care.  The bat braces against that instant of memory and nausea that still finds her unerringly every time she does this, draws breath into her tiny lungs and lets go.  She drops – – tumbling, huge paws whirling, the rock of that shaft whistling past her – just a memory – it just hurt a bit – Robes billow around her as her body stretches into its natural shape and size.  Before her feet touch the soft ground, the woman crouching beneath her flips backwards into the air and rises, cloth-wrapped feet thudding faintly as she lands on a low branch opposite the little clearing.  Hands loosely extended, ready.  A Warrior, yes, if not a Guardian, one of the few survivors.  More importantly, the Witch has recognised the sharp rising move.  Ice Phoenix. The Witch stands, head cocked slightly upwards, barely hiding her boiling excitement, holding the slanting brown eyes in that calm Heavenly Mountains face.  She considers.  The looseness of bearing.  The overly simple clothing.  The arrogance in that humility.  The serene cold of a long-trained killer.  Loneliness.  Purpose.  What fish will you catch me from underneath the crust of ice?  Time in the clearing holds its breath as their stares wrestle.  Finally, the Warrior woman spreads her arms slightly;  bows with a square, compact sort of grace.  “I have no hostile intentions, o …. Witch.  Forgive me if I intrude upon a place of ritual.”  “That was an impressive leap.”  The Witch smiles:  the smile that has unsettled politicians and made spirits melt.  The Warrior woman seems unimpressed.  “I was given guidance to come here and wait.  The night after the full moon.  That which was told me would occur has not.  The error was mine.  I will leave now.”  She makes a move, seems to see the Witch’s readiness, stops.  More wariness.  “I am Fjorent, Witch of Beskarn.  The night is not yet over.  Not until the sun touches the mosses underneath those trees.”  “The one I seek is a Warrior.  Of great power.  I have come to the wrong place.”  Patience now.  The Witch has tamed spirits haughtier than this one.  She keeps her smile.  “I saw you in my dreams.  You were approaching.  I named you Ice Phoenix.  A friendship name, you understand.”  “This Warrior’s name is Tsui Yio Cho.”  The tone is one of challenge.  So I have ruffled you.  The Witch smiles, bones clicking as she throws up her chin.  “Ice Phoenix.  We are agreed, then.”  The Warrior woman stares at her, slanting eyes unblinking, cold.</blockquote>

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