Don't forget to double-check the tags. For those who stay, I hope you enjoy.
------------------------
Elena scrabbled her way up the ridge, awkwardly holding her walking stick off to the side to keep it from tripping her, while carefully preventing her pack from tipping too far and sending her off balance. Following the falling pebbles all the way back down would be a painful experience. Finally cresting the top, she took a moment to look over the landscape again. Even as dry and rocky as it was, with scattered, scraggly trees and little wildlife to speak of, a raw beauty remained in these largely untouched northeastern territories. The sunset certainly helped, streaks of red and yellow crossing the cloudless horizon.
Continuing to watch and rest, Elena spotted two starlings chasing each other in a mad dance. With no wind, she could almost hear their rapid wingbeats over the occasional tweeting. Their path weaved around a patch of young saplings, and passed over a ragged stump, which immediately seized her attention. Pursing her lips and ensuring her pack was secure, she began a slow descent from the ridge towards the stump. At least it started slow. The loose rocks and stones provided terrible footing, and she was forced to finish the second half at a dead sprint, racing the stones all the way down. She managed to momentarily hop onto a firmly embedded boulder twice, killing off some of her speed, before her momentum forced her on.
Dusty, but hardly surprised, she brushed herself off, pulled a strand of her black hair out of her mouth, and continued towards the former tree, the tapping from her walking stick ringing out loudly as it hit rocks only partially buried in the thin soil. Her approach confirmed her suspicions. The stump lacked the clean cut of a saw, or the wedge patterns of an axe. Instead, the tree had been roughly chewed through at its base, as if from a pair of particularly impatient rabid beavers. Or in the case of an arid, temperate environment, once fed by a ley line: cavalry ants. Finally. The jagged edges and splinters of wood had been worn smooth from exposure, left faded and dry from the sun. Clearly, some time had passed since the tree had been chewed through.
Satisfied, Elena turned in a methodical circle, dark green eyes flicking from hill to hill, mentally marking candidates that could have housed the former colony. After a full rotation, she paused a moment, trying to pick between the four she selected with almost no other clues to work with. With a huff, and an impatient tap of her walking stick, she headed to the northmost hill. Have to start somewhere.
Two hills and an hour of searching later, an entrance failed to reveal itself. She rolled her head back and groaned in frustration. Stumbling around in the dark would do more harm than good; might as well make better use of the remaining light. She dropped her pack down at the base of a tree eking out an existence near the top of her current hill. It once had a friend, but wind and weather had toppled it, and the sun baked it into a bone-dry husk. Perfect for firewood at least. The living one wouldn't be alone forever: a few more saplings had sprouted nearby. She collected a few nearby stones into a rough circle, snapped off a few twigs from the fallen tree, and built a small pyramid in the center of the fire ring. Unbuckling the flap to her pack, she pulled out a spare piece of parchment, crumpled it, and delicately placed in within her twig-pyramid. A few heavier sticks from the tree were added around the twigs as a base, and others made another, larger pyramid.
Elena rested on her knees in front of unlit campfire, and reached out her hand, palm up, towards it. She quickly redirected her mana flow and channeled it through her hand. A thick, silvery mist coalesced in her palm, oddly reflective, and almost mirror-like when idle. It swirled and billowed freely, unrestricted by the weak ambient mana in the area. The local ley line had drifted away over a year ago, taking its bounty of free mana with it. She channeled it into a small symbol of power: fire. Or perhaps "heat," as the more pedantic alchemists and sorcerers would argue. Regardless, once the symbol was complete, the mana blossomed into a flame a little larger than a candle, igniting the parchment in the fire circle. She continued to feed the symbol her mana for a few more seconds, until she was satisfied the twigs would catch properly.
She cut the flow, the symbol consuming itself within a breath, and shook her arm off to the side, trying to end the numbness that had creeped in. The pins and needles arrived quickly, and within a few minutes feeling was restored, and her fire was happily crackling away. She rested there for a while, basking in the simple joy of a comfortable fire, before pulling herself away towards her pack. Chewing on some venison jerky, she set a small pan on a flat rock within the circle, and set to frying some sliced mushrooms, the last of her fresh rations. Only jerky left, and not much of it, until she returned home. As the mushrooms seared, she doubled checked her water. Two and a half waterskins left, the partial would be finished tonight. Acceptable, assuming nothing went wrong. Dangerous thoughts, Elena returned to her mushrooms before she jinxed herself.
She thumbed at her book of glass-making for a second, the latest translation from the Thymamologists, but instead snagged her alchemist notes for dinner reading material. The fire was inconvenient as a reading light, but she made do. The last light of the sun disappeared, and the stars came out in force as she reviewed her glyphs and rechecked the physical appearances of possible alchemic plants in the area. Apart from a few wilted cassandra flowers on her first day, she hadn't found much to fill out her ingredient stores. It was to be expected, and it wasn't that much of a problem. She hadn't come all the way out here for some common plant-based materials.
Her head snapped up and she slammed her journal closed. She had forgotten to message her guild! Darting over to her pack, she rummaged through it for her pouch of sending stones, a red cloth bag with several pairs of colored crystal, one of each color completely wrapped in charcoal-stained-black strips of cloth. She snatched the red, unwrapped one and yanked out a slip of parchment. After a few hastily scribbled sentences with a charcoal pencil, reassuring her friends that she was fine, hadn't been eaten yet, fallen down any mysterious holes in the ground, etcetera, etcetera, she made her way over to a flat spot near the fire. Ideally, teleportation symbols were handled with glyphs, so the mage can focus on the flow rate and direction, but a channeling for a small sending stone and message was quite reasonable.
With a leftover twig, Elena drew the symbol in the loose dirt - for reference - tied the parchment to the sending stone, so it wouldn't blow away at its destination, and placed it in the focal point of the symbol, in the left node. She channeled her mana though both hands, and formed the symbol parallel to the ground, matching her outline, and ensured that the mana was touching the sending stone. Hands and forearms already stiff and growing numb, she completed the outer circle of the glyph, activating the reaction. Elena gritted her teeth in concentration, fighting with her own mana as the symbol greedily consumed it. Each of the three nodes in the symbol needed to be prioritized in sequence for a successful teleportation.
With a gasp, she cut off the flow, arms numb up to her shoulders, her chest buzzing slightly as well, a few leftover wisps touching her skin returning to their homes along the nerve fibers. The outline in the dirt remained, the sending stone and its passenger gone. Relieved, Elena returned to her spot by the fire, and began the frustrating, and frankly embarrassing, process of freeing the second red crystal from its bindings with two senseless hands.
