Origami_Narwhal

  My problems resume their march and motion two weeks ter and, as always, when I least want them to. It begins as a shifting of the World around me, a tilting as it is yanked askew and weakened like crumbling soil. The angle would be subtle to most, but to a Delver it's a bonfire on the bckest night.

  I steady myself, hoping that heartbeat of indecision hadn’t startled anyone or loosened my grip. This is perhaps the worst time to be carrying three children back to their parents. But no, of course I won't drop them.

  Not even if I can feel a Delve trying to open. The World strains, pulling itself back together, snapping back like a bowstring. But the tilt continues, pushing, pushing...

  I whip my tail along the ground and bite back a curse, watching to make sure I don’t sweep anyone aside. Gods, can I please get something done without interruption?

  Of all things to interrupt, this isn't the worst, really. I deposit a squirming child into their parents' arms, sentence one to a stern talking to by two parents, and then drop off the st one, waving off yet more apologies. I’m doing my best to sound connected to the conversation.

  No, I'm fine, don't worry about my tail; yes, I'm Dame Crawford, I'm here because I want to experience what the Wildflower District has to offer these days. Both are true statements, though the second one is a bit of a twisting of truth. It leaves a faintly bitter taste on my tongue, and not the pleasant, wine-based sort.

  And not just because a child bit my tail mere moments ago. I dodge a child asking to be lifted into a tree, pat them on the head, and start making my way out of the park I've been in.

  Let’s see. Jumping over buildings is a bit of a waste of energy, so the shortest routes aren’t avaible. In a ft-out run I can probably make it there and back in ten minutes, but maybe I should just seal the Delve first and come back for my gear? Assuming it actually happens.

  “Miss!” Persistent, this one. Time to get going, I’m going to start feeling guilty about disappointing children. “Can you pleeaaaase put me in the tree?” They stretch the ‘please’ out until it's barely recognizable, eyes wide and dangerously cute.

  Bah. Fine.

  “You know what? Sure.” I shake my head, sigh, and lift a now-squealing kid up with both arms, just for safety. “Don't squirm, it makes you harder to hold.”

  They squirm anyways, and it takes me a little more time than I'd like to put them onto a properly safe and low branch.

  “I wanted that one though! Up there! Higher up, where Mire-ice can hear me!” I stick a hand out to steady them as they fil, gesturing at a higher branch.

  “Mireise. Mire-ee-see,” I correct absently. “If you learn to climb, you can get there yourself, you know.”

  The gleam in the kid's eyes indicates I have probably given the kid a bad idea, but it's a bit te to stop it now.

  “And then Mire-easy can take me on adventures?”

  “I'd ask... a priest, I guess?” I suggest, because I do not want to give the kid more ideas. Mireise may be the God of Paths, and therefore adventure, but they look a bit young to be wandering off into the woods.

  ...The smile they've got is cute, though. Now to go keep everyone safe, because it feels like the Delve is genuinely going to form. The waves of the World p at my calves, and they’re not getting any better.

  I turn and stride out of the park, leaning on Wind to cover more ground than a regur human can dream of. Let’s see, at this hour it’s a little risky to run down the main street, so strike my earlier pn. The map is sharp in my mind, memorized now, and I draw a dozen little routes before something looks good. Through a few of the lovely parks, jump the canal to take a nice cut through some alleys? That should work. Wait, isn't the padin due today? With all the expectations of receiving a guest like Padin Greyfeather, and talking about pns I already know?

  An absolute shame, then, that I'll have to leave Winston to wait alone. Terrible, getting to rip apart monsters and follow my calling. I might even have to throw a few boulders, if the Delve has them.

  Gods, if I'm lucky I might get to catch Dongbaek trying to cut holes in my city. Hadn’t thought of that somehow, time to really speed up. If I find him again, I’ll do more than break an arm.

  I won’t fail again.

  “Goddess, finally,” I hiss, bouncing on my heels. I'm not walking so much as gliding along the ground, picking up as much speed as I can gather cheaply. My tail taps a jaunty rhythm along the cobbled street, swaying and tick tacking along behind me. “Lizzie can keep her damn intrigue. This was a terrible idea.”

  Sure as can be, the Delve is there, a jagged and golden hole in the World's fabric. Not a hint of a ritual circle or anything else— but now that I'm looking, I'm almost certain it’s artificial. A natural Delve has the feel of cloth worn thin, stretched until the World frays and snaps. This, though? This Delve is cut from thick cloth. The clean shorn lines, the violent pulls and stretches; all of it reminds me of my parents' work, albeit far more novice.

  However much effort the culprits poured into this, stitching it and reinforcing it against monsters is simple work. It's infuriating work, sitting there while the culprits are almost certainly getting away, but the portal is more important. The Padin can py cat to the mice, I can do my job, and hopefully everything gets resolved within a month or two. Maybe before the first snowfall!

  Hah. Wishful thinking, that. I snort as I pull the st stitch tight, severing the gilded string. Be realistic, Ivy.

  Still, after checking the area and finding nothing, I make the run back to the Manor to put on my gear. Tempting as it is, I don't stop for snacks, only to notify the guard about the Delve.

  Benny does give me snacks though, and lets me know that Winston is looking for me. Apparently, Padin Greyfeather is here already, and I should attend the meeting where we expin everything if possible.

  Mm. Yet another thing Winston wants me to do, that I absolutely won’t. I’ve got a job to do, after all. And, really, fighting monsters is going to be an excellent reprieve from... everything.

  And, by Adamantine does this Delve provide.

  I sm a monster against a twisted pilr, cws digging into the crumbling shale of its carapace. Green ink bleeds between my fingers, oozing from every fracture, finding no more purchase on my scales than the monster’s own limbs. Still, it fils, mandibles mashing, cmping down on my other arm.

  Snarling, I pour Wind into that arm and pull. Those sleek, sharp-edged mandibles groan and creak, crumbling as the monster’s legs scrabble fruitlessly along my armor and scales.

  A second tug, just as vicious, drags my arm away with a chunk of the head still attached. With a roar, I spin its body around and toss it into the four coming up behind me, coming as the dozens before have. The head, still twitching, is dropped to the ground and stomped on.

  This Delve yer is a warped temple of whitish stone, an endless series of cracked and curving hallways with stone “torches” burning a sickly, sulfurous yellow. Massive stone-armored bugs lurk in the flickering shadows, hiding behind twisted columns of the same white stone as the floor. Doors lead nowhere or back where I came, looping through pces I’ve been or ejecting me out across the hall. Windows overlook a smudged suggestion of a sunset, yet all of them have deposited me right back at the entrance. Pleasantly, this yer seems to be a rge one.

  If I say it a bit more simply, it’s a fun Delve yer with monsters that feel excellent to break. And break them I will. The columns and building, being made of what seems to be marble, also break easily.

  The corpse handles one of the monsters, cracking it along the middle and spilling green ichor across the floor. Perhaps it's a substance from a faraway nd, perhaps it's green ink; I'll never know. Bugs two and three come right at me, with bug four cmbering up a twisted pilr and lurching onto the wall. Leap, kick, and crunch into the head of bug two, pressing it into the ground and spreading cracks through its shell. The bug's shudder is instant, and my tail fres out to keep me banced. Feh, I'd hoped that would kill.

  Bug three's front section is rising, though, and bug four is angling toward the ceiling. Another stomp might kill the bug beneath me, but a potential pincer attack— heh, pincers, bugs— is a risk I don't need to take. I run down the bug's length, ducking under a lunge and moving myself behind all three attackers.

  My boots hit the floor, my tail swings around, and I curl my cws into fists. With a snarl, I twist my body in a brutal pivot, driving a fist directly into the lunging monster's side. Shale cracks and crumbles, shattering beneath my scales and pressing into the softer stone beneath. Its body fractures and scatters, carried along by its own momentum until it crashes into a wall.

  Flicking dark green ink from my cws, I gnce up to watch the bug on the ceiling. Probably going to drop or circle around, and in either case I should kill the bug still writhing on the floor.

  A pn works its way through my head, and I grin between heavy breaths. Perhaps I can solve both of my problems at once. I've already thrown a few, this shouldn't be too bad.

  Ducking down, I work my cws under the bug's back end, hooking around the stony shell. I brace my arms, angling them so I can use my entire back to yank. The monster comes off the ground with an agonizing screech, back end first, and sure enough the other monster is circling around to get behind me. Shifting my stance and pouring Wind into my legs, I whip the monster around like a rope, pivot, and sm it headfirst into the one above me. The motion stings at my shoulders and back, my heart surges, but the thunderous crack of two deaths is worth the trouble.

  The scattering of sharp-edged shale and green ink, less so. Their bodies crash to the ground marches away in a senseless tangle, a pile of rubble in a sludgy pool of dark-green.

  Bah.

  My heart thunders in my chest, loud enough that I can't quite hear my own growl of satisfaction. Muscles tingle up and down my back, twinging from the heavy loads but still ready for more. The moment my breathing steadies, I draw a Depth gauge from my belt, check the Delve Depth, and flip it over to try and re-settle the compass. Ritualistic, easy, and excellent for centering myself.

  Perhaps it's unnecessary. Perhaps it's a little overcautious, when I've seen their sharpest bits shatter on my scales. But as I've been reminded in recent weeks— twice now, a thought that burns in my chest— my overconfidence is my worst enemy. So I check the damn gauge and make sure the compass is set rather than relying on my gut, then set off once more.

  I push deeper into the shadowed halls, eyes scanning through the eye-wateringly yellow torchlight, senses cast wide. Each window is a wound of abyssal dark, devouring light and exhaling frigid air. They're all a little shallower in the Delve than their surroundings— likely as shallow as the other end, the bizarre courtyard I'd been spat out into by the Delve portal. A small blessing, that; one of the first windows I checked deposited me upside-down.

  Skittering echoes from distant halls, bouncing back on itself into a painful chorus of countless monsters. My growl chases the sounds back down the hall, low and rumbling. Everything that crosses my path turns to rubble and ink, leaving my green-tipped cws to drip clean as I step over my victories.

  Honestly, it's a pleasant break from Craumont. I am alone, after all— here, two hundred and twenty marches beneath the World. Threats surround me, peering from shadow, but here the answers are simple. Solve the strangeness, revel in battle, and return to reality with my prizes. Is this reductive of my life's work? Yes. There are Delves that are genuine puzzles, after all. There are yers that take hours to learn to look at, or need to be looked at purely in the abstract. Some can't even be observed; the headaches of impossibility can sometimes be too much.

  But this is, well, not that, heh. Instead, I'm pitching a bug monster at five more from ten marches away, using Wind. It's fun. A few kicks and punches is all it takes to clean up.

  And frankly, anything is better than niceties with a padin of Adamantine while my cousin tries to drag them into his schemes. Gods. I'll take that weird sand-snake thing any day. I'd even take these bugs, even if they're a bit annoying; the green is starting to stain, uh, everything. My gear will be fine after a bit of scrubbing and magic to feed the enchantments, but my hair? Bah. Bleh, even.

  I let out a rumbling sigh and crush another bug's head against a wall, listening to the sizzle as droplets of ink sptter across a torch.

  “Padins aren't that bad,” I say, making my case to the wall. I pause to pour Wind into my arms and legs, flicking off the green ink before it stains. “Most are stuffy, but they're good people and followers of Adamantine. Gods, wasn't it a Drake padin that inspired me to drop into Delves?”

  Now that was a breathtakingly attractive woman. Helped me figure out more than just my desire to have a tail, honestly. Shaking my head free of such lovely mental paintings, I drag my focus back to unreality.

  Heh. With a snort at my own awful humor, I take another check of the Depth— 270-odd marches, excellent progress— and then flick the compass a few times before taking a new heading. The alchemic gold needle spins, wobbling and unsure at first, but slowly settling on a direction almost aligned with a hallway.

  The tricky bit, or rather the interesting bit, is that the end of this hallway looks exactly like the floor— unlike every other hallway, which vanishes into the void. I've seen enough impossible spaces to know the floor is probably just curving upward. Which is Delve down, of course. My tail bounces off the ground, making a satisfying series of clicks and thumps, and then I set off, stepping carefully around any ink puddles.

  Hopefully this pce has another yer. Nothing quite takes the mind off things like the twisting impossibility of Delves!

  Wait, no. Deeper Delves hurt the wards more. Darn.

  My ascent is victorious, swift, and most disappointingly, snake-free. I push up through three hundred marches of Delve with two Hearts in my bag— they usually fall apart a week after being removed from their home Delve, but with an indeterminate group of Delve-openers, a week where I can quickly patch a new portal is nice.

  All I need to do now is stride through the portal, seal it, and return to the Manor before Winston can find me. I am distinctly green-tinged at the moment and rectifying this issue via bath is my top priority.

  Unfortunately, this eagerness turns to anticipation as the Delve portal pinches and twists before me. Golden mist thickens, the Delve itself lurches up, dragged by a hook to shallower waters in a way I am intimately familiar with.

  Someone or something has decided to join me.

  Hopefully not Helena, she seemed occupied in the library this morning... but who could it be, then? One of Dongbaek's ilk?

  My cws flex, clicking along the surface of the rger Delve Heart. The pallid yellow light flickers before brightening, almost eager to answer my call. Its inky power creeps along my veins, slipping through my muscles and clinging to bone. Scales thicken and spread, my tail sweeps the ground in rhythmic anticipation, and Lightning answers my call eagerly.

  The World inhales, and spits out a blur of bck, brown, and grey. I twitch, but hold my ground.

  A heartbeat ter, the blur resolves itself, steadying on lean limbs while grumbling with surprising lightness. Shaggy bck hair with peppery grey streaks, leather underarmor pted with silvery steel, and rose-brown skin. Their head jerks up, cocked to the side, and a bright yellow eye rakes over my body. My instincts stir as their hand reaches for a mace belted to their side.

  I look back at them, inspecting the sharp cut of their jaw and the inscrutable pursing of their lips. A Mageblood, from how their eyes glow; the subtle feathering at their temples and curving of their nails only reinforces it. I'd remember someone like this living in Craumont— aside from their stumble, they seem utterly unbothered by the Delve.

  Their lips curl, and I resist the urge to peel my lips back into a toothy smile. It's harder when their smirk turns to an incredibly bright grin, taking on an expression I can only describe as hawkish.

  “Oh! You're the Delver, aren't you?” They say, their voice as bright as their tone. It has a musical, trilling lilt wrapped in an Ard Judician accent. “You got right on it, didn't you, that's excellent. I'm the padin, here to help!”

  Ah, yes, of course. If I won't go to the padin, she'll come to me. At least, I recall that Padin Greyfeather is a she, so hopefully I'm not off on that one.

  “They didn't tell me you were...” her smile widens impossibly, “So green in the profession, though.”

  My first “words” to her are not words, but a strangled mix of a ugh and a sigh.

  Origami_Narwhal