Chapter 35.5: Yissa's Detour

Shifting a bare foot in the mossed, chocolaty soil of the Duskstruck Moors, Sergeant Ventyr closed his eyes and forced all his concentration into imagining the root system of the Pale Tree. He’d been at it for some time now, standing silently before the mound of earth he’d drawn up for sculpting.

The Mother’s roots were the most stable, immutable part of her, anchoring her to Tyria and drawing on its very strength. Those traits—strength and stability—they were the things he was looking for. They were the things he always looked for when he sculpted. Working with the stablest of the elements calmed him, grounded him. At least it usually did.

The mound in front of him had remained formless, despite his efforts to give it shape for the last hour. Worse still, the tranquil stability he was reaching out for remained just beyond him, right along with his mental picture of the Mother, which was hazy at best. What seemed to have no problem taking solid form were his questions, his anxieties, his annoyances—he had more of them than he could sculpt away.

Almost three days past, he and Scholar Yissa had left Arterium Haven, passing through the Muridian Uplands and into the Brisban Wildlands. They’d stayed the last two nights in Mrot Boru, a curious, cliffside waystation serving the colleges of Rata Sum, and then at a makeshift Priory fort in the hills of Mirkrise. At each stop Ventyr had remained single-minded in his mission: to reach his outpost at the edge of the moors and inform his team of the threat they faced, as soon as possible. Yissa, however, had not stayed so focused, getting drawn into a dozen different conversations with engineers, magitechnical theorists, explorers, and historians wherever and whenever she found them.

The majority of her conversations were benign, really. Only a few Priory exchanges went further into the details of their mission than Ventyr would have liked, and most of her discussions were had at night, when there was nowhere to go and nothing else to do until the morning. Quietly, Ventyr managed his annoyance at her gabbing, but the biggest challenge with the scholar at both locations had been getting her moving again when she’d invariably risen early and gotten into yet another exchange. For someone so insistent of the threat that anything mursaat could pose, she was far too easily distracted and far too difficult to refocus.

In fact, standing there in the Duskstruck Moors now, wasting time carving soil sculptures to calm himself, Ventyr’s was again at the mercy of her whims. They could have passed right through the edge of the moors on their way to the outpost, where they could have shared their information and gathered help and supplies before returning to the heart of the moors for a fuller reconnaissance. Yissa, however, would not wait, and neither Ventyr’s rank nor his insistence could stop her.

As soon as they’d crossed into the moors—as soon as Ventyr had mentioned they’d reached the region at all—the scholar had all but demanded they stop and perform a “preliminary data-gathering” immediately. Before he could respond, she was off, bounding up the broad, grassy rises, insisting that he needn’t worry about her, that she would return “post-haste” and “with a firmer comprehension of potential leads.”

The scholar was nothing if not passionate, but right then, Ventyr didn’t find it a virtue.

Catching his wandering thoughts, Ventyr inhaled deeply and glanced up at the thin clouds that drifted across the bright afternoon sky. He took up the struggle again to find the earth’s stability, though another element was much closer at hand. A slow breeze had started to flow around him, crackling with tiny, impatient sparks he tried to ignore.

Yissa, of course, wasn’t the only thing weighing on him; she was just the most present of his stressors. Behind his impatience with her were more problems than he honestly knew how to address: the safety of his team and the asura krewe they were protecting, the reemergence of a 200-year-old threat, and some wandering band of thieves who’d stolen the remains of that threat from a Lionguard haven. He’d spent the last days particularly pondering the last of those, and it still made very little sense. Why did they want shattered jade? How did they even know the jade had been there? The only people who’d known anything about it were the Lionguard themselves, a few of the vigilmen at Ventyr’s outpost, and the people he and Yissa had traveled with.

Ventyr cracked his knuckles, feeling them heat up involuntarily as Penny came back to mind. Could she have had a hand in this, too?

It might be a stretch to think that she was working with some bandit gang this far into Maguuma, but a season past, he would have said the same about her drugging and robbing him. No, a season past he would have said that was impossible: that no matter how self-centered Penny could get, there were lines she’d never cross. Now he knew better, though. What she’d done and when she’d done it still made only half sense to him, but it didn’t change the fact that she’d done it, that she’d been willing to do it. What galled him wasn’t just her actions, though; it was that he’d chosen to trust her for so long.

With Penny the motivation was easy: she did it for the money. These bandits, stealing nearly a ton of the jade, though? It just didn’t seem that simple. Maybe she was their source of information, but they had some deeper reason. They had to.

Of course, if there were more of those constructs already lurking about prior to that group’s involvement—which Yissa seemed to think was quite possible—what did the plans of a handful of human thieves even matter? By the Tree, it felt like each of his worries had an even worse one behind it.

He halted the current of his thoughts. Scholar Yissa was still out meandering the moors, and he couldn’t let himself fall prey to the same type of wandering mind with which she’d gotten them here.

Clenching a fist, Ventyr embraced the spark of the air that he’d been trying so hard to avoid. It rushed into him, and he flung it off his fingertips, curling into a whirlwind that swept across the mound of earth, sparking and scattering soil in all directions before both collapsed into nothing, returning to the elements they’d been drawn from. Ventyr looked past it up the peated hillside, to the last craggy lip he’d seen the scholar disappear over some time ago. It was well past time they were moving again, and this time she would heed him.

He took a mental picture of where he was leaving their bags, snatched up his staff, and drew a deep breath before scrambling up the steep face toward the next rise. If he couldn’t resolve his impatience, he could at least use it.

Ventyr crested that lip and continued to hike up the short, uneven hills for a quarter of an hour, listening to the squawks and chatter between the birds as he scanned the landscape for the asura. In seasons gone by, he could remember enjoying the songs of the local wildlife.

“Scholar Yissa,” he called, cupping hands to his mouth. “It’s time we be on our way!”

The birds continued to call around him, and he could pick out the far-flung cries of hunting raptors and trilling cockatoos as he scanned the landscape for a sign of her. He’d found her blatant tracks, but he very much hoped she’d respond without him having to walk right up on top of her. Either way they would be pressing on to their destination the moment he did find her.

Some hundred paces ahead of him stood a group of boulders, dark with lichen and easily large enough to hide a norn. Her tracks led toward it.

“Scholar, where are you?” he called again, still working to keep the edge out of his voice. “We need to continue!”

From somewhere farther up the hillside, among a small thicket of brush and mimosa saplings, came the cackling caw of a bird that sounded familiar, though not to this region. He would have ignored the unusual sound, but it came again, from elsewhere this time.

A raven? Yes, odd though it was, it sounded like a raven, something he’d never seen feather of anywhere in Maguuma.

It didn’t matter, though. The mission was all that mattered. Ventyr rounded the large stones. “Scholar?”

“Well,” came a voice that wasn’t Yissa’s, “looks like the mice were right. It took you long enough, though.”

As the man spoke, Ventyr caught sight of him. Clearly human and waiting coolly, he leaned against the rock and trained a pistol on Ventyr’s face. Something about this tall, stick of a human seemed familiar, though Ventyr couldn’t place him. Perhaps annoyed to be there, he didn’t seem the least bit anxious over what he was doing. The gun in his hand tickled at something in the back of Ventyr’s mind, too.

The sylvari cracked his knuckles around his staff, eyes flitting to assess the rest of the scene. He could determine who the man was later. For now,  he’d walked into some kind of an ambush, and he had to know how bad it was. Was it just this one man? How many were with him? Where was the scholar? Could he get them out of it? He readied himself, feeling even more intently the tickle of sparks on his fingertips.

“I wouldn’t get any bright ideas if I were you,” the man said, still lounging against the mossy side of the boulder. He wagged the pistol at Ventyr again. “At least not if you want to keep the asura alive. If you don’t care, that’s fine. Our boss’ll be pissed that you died, but I can go that way too. Your call.”

From that copse of trees came another raven’s caw: once, twice, and three times.

The man nodded, glancing to the trees. “Looks like you’re alone after all.”

“Where is she?” Ventyr demanded. Heat and static vied for his attention. “Where is Scholar Yissa?”

The human nodded toward the thicket, returning the caw with a staccato bird call of his own, and three more humans emerged from their cover: two stocky men and a woman dragging a wicked greatsword. One of them shifted a small figure to the front of the group. Bound and with a bag over its head, it wore the blue and gray of the Durmand Priory. The woman jerked the bag free and confirmed what Ventyr already knew. Yissa.

“Apologies, Sergeant,” the Scholar called to him across the distance. He could hear the anxiety in her voice. It wasn’t quite fear, the mother bless her, but it was close. “I was searching for clues, and I must have grown hyper-focused. These ruffians crept upon me in perfect stealth, despite their seeming disadvantage of size and clumsiness. I—”

“That’s enough,” groaned the human with the pistol. “Shut her up.” The woman tugged the bag back down over Yissa’s head and clubbed her with the blunt face of the broadsword. Yissa crumpled to the earth in a heap.

The man pushed off the stones, standing straight up, and with a tired scowl, he waved the gun again, this time at Ventyr’s staff. “So? Are you going to put that thing down, or should we make this messy? Like I said, I’m fine either way.”

There were only four of them: one close enough for hand-to-hand engagement and three possibly near enough for a well placed lightning strike. They were grouped tightly, which would bode well for that type of attack. With Yissa’s proximity, though, It would have to be a very accurate strike indeed. He didn’t know if that was possible.

Ventyr cut his considerations short, suddenly feeling a new pair of eyes on him. Keeping the man with pistol in his periphery, he turned his head to catch sight of a new figure looming up behind him. Even from the corner of his eye, Ventyr knew the man was huge, easily a foot taller and twice as broad as Ventyr himself. He might have passed for a small norn.

“Come on,” the new man laughed dully. He lugged a warhammer to his shoulder. “Make it messy. I’m bored.”

Ventyr looked back and forth between them and suddenly remembered the pair. From the Queen’s Forest. In Kryta. They were two of the brigands who had taken them all captive on the road out of Divinity’s Reach. Yes, and now he saw that the gun in the man’s hand was Penny’s, the one she’d complained about losing. What were they doing here of all places?

No, it didn’t matter. Two against one while Ventyr was trying to strike the trio in the trees with a targeted bolt of lightning? That was not a situation in his favor. But if he didn’t do it now, he lost any element of surprise he might have—and his Vigil brothers and sisters were so close.

His eyes widened. That was it. He’d have only a second to channel both effects before the two men would be on him, so he began with the one he was already holding.

Silently he compressed the air above the thicket until the charge built to bursting and released the shot downward in a single thread of electricity that passed through the woman’s head, body, and leg. It exploded into the ground, blowing her associates back several feet in either direction and tossing Yissa forward to roll a short way down the hillside. The woman collapsed, still smoking.

At the same time, Ventyr spun, screaming all his rage into a torrent of flame that spiraled along his outstretched arm, shooting off in a ball of fire he aimed up at the sky. The two men beside him both ducked, their instincts taking over, and Ventyr watched the tallest nearby tree burst alight, suddenly burning like an enormous torch. He exhaled, honestly surprised the gambit had worked.

Now weakened by such precise executions, Ventyr gritted his teeth and spun again, extending his staff to connect with the large man’s face beside him. The crack of it nearly wrenched the gnarled wood from Ventyr’s grip, but he held on as the giant man stumbled a step back, freeing him to lunge out of the hammer’s reach and inside the effective range of the other man’s pistol, where he swept downward to pull the slender man’s feet out from under him. Raising an arm in the air, Ventyr called the earth itself to bind the man before he could respond, and fingers of thickening soil overtook him, starting with his weapon.

Ventyr shot a glance back at the thicket where Yissa still lay unconscious. He’d likely killed one of the rogues there—at very least he’d incapacitated her—which bought him a few seconds to handle the other two, if only he could draw the strength and get there in time. He conjured a gale behind him, once again compressing the air to bursting and— stopped.

Eyes wide, the sylvari let the effect puff out as little more than a spherical breeze that rattled the branches atop his head.

There were no longer two bandits there beside Yissa, because four more had appeared, with at least another pair on their heels. He hadn't before noticed the shrubbed ridgeline fifty paces southwest of his position, but now he did, as a handful of human thugs crept out of the foliage there too. Still more suddenly appeared atop the nearby buttes. He and Yissa hadn't just been ambushed; they’d been trapped, and it had been very much premeditated. There were more opponents than he could hope to fight in the open. He looked again to Yissa, still unconscious and now held by the collar by one of the eight thugs in that thicket. He made the only right decision.

Raising his hands, he dropped his weapon and knelt. “Do not harm her. I surrender.”

The grasping dirt subsided, and the slender bandit scraped himself free of it, scrambling to his feet as he cleaned himself off. “You’re damn straight you do.”

The big man, having recovered himself, stomped forward and hefted the huge hammer back to his shoulder. He growled something guttural and hocked blood, spitting it in the dirt. “You’re going to pay for that, shrub.”

“Gregor, leave it. This is what the boss wanted.” The slender one said it like the other would listen to him, in spite of temperament that hinted at the contrary.

“I’m not droppin’ it, Remi. You see what he did to ‘Phelia?”

“I saw it,” Remi replied. He’d regained that cool tone, though he was still brushing dirt off himself. “But I told you: the boss wants them alive. Wants him alive.”

The big man’s hammer had a head the size of Ventyr’s chest, which he flung forward, letting the haft slide though his hand. With a squeeze, Gregor stopped its momentum within inches of Ventyr’s right leg and held it there. The man was certainly strong, upholding that hammer by the very butt of the haft.

“I don’t want to kill him, Remi,” Gregor barked, glaring down at Ventyr. “Not yet. I just want to break a leg or two.”

The slender one pinched the bridge of his beak-like nose and groaned. “And how exactly is he going to walk back then? Are you going to carry him the whole way?”

Gregor released the weight, letting the hammer’s head swing down into the ground. “I— could.”

“Just tie him up and get him on his feet.” Remi was still shaking his head as he turned back to a bucktooth man coming up behind him. “Dose him, and let’s get going.” Scooping up the staff Ventyr had dropped, he glanced at the treetop now fully ablaze. “That wasn’t an accident.”

The big man grunted disapprovingly, but to Ventyr’s surprise, he complied without further argument, all but pulling Ventyr’s arms out of joint as he bound them together behind him. The bucktooth man was on him as well, uncorking a small flask of something. He held it at arm's length and forced it down under Ventyr’s nose.

Ventyr held his breath as long as he could, but when the leader kicked him in the side, there was little he could do. Reflexively Ventyr drew a deep breath of air that was laced thickly with whatever sour concoction vented from the mouth of that flask. He sputtered a cough, feeling the burn in his lungs as the world began to change around him. It’s colors and shapes shifted, bulged, and receded again, trees and grass blending together and then re-separating, as though viewed through an oily pool. He heard everything the humans around him said, but with each passing moment, the thoughts in his head became thicker, harder to focus on.

Ventyr looked up to see the warping face of the leader, whose name he could no longer come up with. He was having a hard time connecting many thoughts at all.

The man leaned in for a closer inspection as someone shoved Ventyr from behind, starting his movement forward. “I guess those asura are good for something, after all. Should make it real hard to light us up, with your head in the clouds, huh?”

Somehow, the drug seemed to have a lesser effect on his balance than his vision and thought; though the world appeared to flex and bend around him, he was able to walk between shoves. He tried quietly to reach for the elements, touch them, tug at them—anything. Air and earth should have been right there at his disposal, but just as the bandit had said, they were untouchable, like a greasy film had bubbled up between him and the natural world. There really was nothing he could do.

“You two,” the leader said somewhere behind Ventyr now. “Go collect anything valuable off the dead. The rest of us are heading back.”  Again Ventyr heard the now garbled sound of raven caws in a different pattern than before, and all the druggedly dancing human silhouettes along the butte receded away.

“Ain’t we gettin’ them,” the big one asked. “Ain’t we gettin’ ‘Phelia, to bury her? They’s our friends, ain’t they? Mantle brothers and sisters and stuff.”

“Now you want to carry dead bodies for half a day?” Ventyr heard the leader retort. “Ophelia knew what could happen. We all do. Let’s just get these two moving and finish the boss’ deal.”

Half a day, he said. The thought was muddled in Ventyr’s head but still just on the edge of intelligible. He had no idea where they were going, but now he at least had a distance—he just had to remember it. Anything they gave him, he had to remember it.

“I hate them mice,” the larger man said somewhere behind Ventyr. His voice had grown darker. “I don’t trust ‘em. The boss don’t see it, but I don’t trust ‘em. ‘Specially that one in charge, Remi. I don’t trust her.”

“You’re not wrong,” the other groaned, almost hesitantly. “Now let’s get moving.”

The bandits pressed him on up the incline. One or two bulging, warping people walked ahead of him, but most were somewhere behind. He had a hard enough time focusing on each step before him that even the idea of glancing back made him feel dizzy, but he strained to absorb everything he could of what the group said around him.

Beside him, another human carried Scholar Yissa’s unconscious form across his shoulders.  And beyond that, Ventyr squinted hard to make sense of a flickering, orange light that he thought he recognized. Part of it broke loose and fell unevenly to the ground, and far above, thick, black smoke was already twisting and streaming upward into the sky from the rest of the burning tree. He’d successfully set a beacon. Now he had to trust his people would see it.