Aetherdrawn Supplements

Clay Under the Rain (One Shot)

151st of Gnielm, 336 EA

Peyr Myarsa

Thousands on thousands of raindrops rocketed into the swamp, the sounds of their stormed impacts overlaid in Gavril’s ears by the fatal creaking of the wood undergirding of Peyr.

“There!” Mellema screamed down the sluiceway, pointing to water pilling on acute water as they were nearly swept away by the rush, “Clog!”

Gavril wiped away the soaked and matted hair that had turned against him in obscuring his vision, to see that the massive drainage had seen a tumble of lodged wood and leaves, mud and muck and moss.

Mellema set their wide form as a rock against the spray, a wake forming around them as they held to the ridge of the gutter with all their might. They struggled to reach a hand in, to pull at the edges of the mass, but any bit they were able to move by manual force was inconsequential to the pressure of the whole. “There’s too much! It’s gonna burst, we have to turn back!”

Gavril’s eyes turned down to see the silhouette of the sloped city below, and in the rain-hazed tableau he swore he could see the shapes of it’s people flowing across it’s platforms to ward against the storm. “We can’t let it!”

In that moment of desperation, Gavril reached outside of himself to a place he had not dared to acknowledge in the many years since he had ingratiated himself into Peyr. He felt the swamp, and he felt it’s monarch in their sick satisfaction, and finally he felt himself facing down this threat.

The skin of his arm began to slough away as it turned to wet clay under the rain, reforming and reforming itself as he pointed to the tangle of unnatural nature blocking the sluiceway.

“P’iur R’ud” He spoke these words of power only to the rain, and at his command the dam burst outwards in shards of spiteful wood.

The water roared down it’s intended flow, a great wave gathered just to the point before it could devastate.

Gavril breathed heavy, suddenly feeling the weight of his body as earth reformed into flesh.

Mellema looked to him with eyes held wide and punctuated by rain or disbelieving tears, he could not tell which.

And by his swamp-birthed hand, the city was saved from flood.
No Beds (One Shot)

34th of Gnielm, 328 EA

Peyr Myarsa

There were no beds, outside of Peyr. Not as far as Jagos knew, at least.

He and Mirdel slept on planks hoisted up into low marshland trees, for as long as the boughs would hold them. When they were intimate it was standing calf-deep in mud more often than not. They’d lean against their slobsled, the one that Mirdel had stolen and piled everything they owned onto, and they’d take each other rough.

That’s what made this such a treat, rolling around in feather-filled luxury. It wasn’t even a particularly nice mattress, frayed and clumpy, but the overbearing layers of blankets reminded Jagos of what few memories he had of his childhood before the exile. It was nice for him to lay Mirdel’s lithe body down onto a soft surface, to see the way that the disguise of a conservator’s robes draped across his partner.

“We can’t do this,” Mirdel let out in a giggling hush, “What if someone comes home?”

“That’s not gonna happen.” Jagos mumbled into Mirdel’s neck as he kissed.

Mirdel’s back arched. “They could be back sooner than you think though, and what then?”

“Relax, they’re not going to come back,” Jagos continued nonchalantly, “They’re dead.”

“What?” Mirdel sat himself up, pushing out from underneath Jagos. “What do you mean they’re dead?”

“They’re dead, so they aren’t gonna come back,” Jagos furrowed an exasperated brow “I don’t know any other way to say it.”

“Did you kill them?” Mirdel’s eyes darted around the foreign bedroom.

“No, fucking- no, I didn’t kill them, why do you think that’s something I’d do? I was scouting out, trying to find an easy mark, and I saw them fall off the ledge of the city.” Jagos pushed themselves up to standing, off of the bed.

“You were going to fuck me in a dead mans bed?” Mirdel didn’t let off, “That’s revolting.”

“It’s a bed. It’s not like he died in it, what’s the difference.” Jagos started around on irritated pacing. “Besides, we’re here to fucking rob the guy. We broke the fucking seal on respectability the moment we walked in the door.”

Mirdel gave a scrunched look like he had smelled something foul. “Whatever. Let’s just get this over with.”

So the two of them began to swipe what they needed. Food out of cabinets, medicines out of a small chest. A blanket that would roll up tight enough to fit in their bag.

For a second, when he shifted quietly past the door of the home, Jagos considered walking out. Just opening that door, and walking away. He didn’t, because he knew he’d be caught. Without Mirdel he wouldn’t be able to make it back down to the swamp and even if he did he wouldn’t be able to pull the slobsled out fast enough on his own.

He made the disguises, Mirdel picked the locks. Mirdel lit fires in the wet, he cooked. He slept, Mirdel watched, and then they switched. They needed each other, and in that need they worked to find some way to want.
Listen Close Now (One Shot)

115th of Nemulum, 315 EA

Peyr Myarsa

“Listen, and listen close now, Matij,” Ruzica spoke in warmth from wisdom, and felt the unequivocal attention of their grandson levied onto her words. “We are conservators, that is our role in this world, and it is quite the precious thing that we are meant to conserve.”

“Wha is it?” Matij pushed themselves up from from sitting to a bend using both of their hands, and then straightened their back up to a wobbled standing.

“What a very good question!” Ruzica leaned down to Matij’s level, giving her hands for the boy to grab and steady himself. She smiled and he smiled back, encouraged. “You’re lucky that your old ma-ma has seen so much, that she can tell you about these things. We conserve Old Myarsa.”

“Wassit?” Matij’s eyes were wide, wider than Ruzica could remember ever having seen on a child.

“Well, There is not much left of it within our reach, not much at all. Most of it has fallen below the swamp. But, before all that, before Peyr and before it really even needed to be conserved, Old Myarsa was a glorious city. Every inch of land was a part of it, the whole of the swamp. So powerful was it, it even managed to creep into the shallow edges of the aether, if you can believe such a thing!” Tales such as these flowed through Ruzica, her pitch modulating from the hush of sharing a secret to a finely crafted reverence. “It was a place made of stone, large and steady, and of iron without rust. Iron is important, quite important young one. The iron of Old Myarsa graces our conservator’s axes, to help us beat back the swamp demons!”

Ruzica lunged forward theatrically, stomping around in mockery of the monsters outside the city as Matij squealed in delight and terror.

“Mother!” Khordan’s voice came from behind, startling the two of them out of their play. “Don’t tell such awful stories. We’ll never get to bed if you fill his thoughts with axes and demons.”

Ruzica’s brow furrowed as Matij grew quiet and toddled over to his father. “It is no thing to shirk from, don’t you think the boy should know why we keep the iron?”

“I just think there’s a softer way to explain it for him.” Khordan lifted Matij up onto his hip.

“It’s the way of the world, son!” Ruzica was speaking more ramblingly now. “We do what we must to reach the holy temples unharmed. And one day, when Old Myarsa has been dredged up and the muck is no more, we will lay down those axes and return their iron to it’s proper place.”

Khordan bounced Matij up and down as they spoke. “Yes, mother, I know the stories. I know that they’re important to you. I just think that it’s not a trouble worth giving him.

“He’s young!” Ruzica intoned with great force, “He needs to know why we do the things we do. The stories teach him. If not that, how will he live? How will he live well?”

“Mother. Listen to me.” Khordan gave an exasperated breath, “We go to temple. We listen to the word of the high abbots. We work for the good of Peyr. We’re doing everything right. He’s being raised in a good family, he’s going to be devout. There’s no doubt about it in my mind, so all I can think when you share these things is, why burden him?”

“Well, I don’t know about all of that.” Ruzica huffed, feeling as though she had suddenly been put quite in her dotage.

“Just cool it with the demon talk, that’s all I ask.” Khordan turned to walk out from the room. As he did, Matij crawled up over his shoulder, keeping those wide wide eyes on his grandmother the whole time he was walked away.
Defy the Swamp Its Meal (One Shot)

89th of Gnielm, 298 EA

Peyr Myarsa

“Come come, Vilppu, Tuukka.” Kujal tottered along through the swamp, moving unhurriedly along slowly winding paths. Where he called behind him, the bushes rustled and a low groaning rumble emanated from a source unseen. “Much to do, much to do.”

He had walked long and far over the length of this swamp. It was a hunched walk by now, at his age, but he didn’t really have anywhere else to go, and so he moved from aetherline to aetherline and back again.

It was through early morning mist that he heard the call. “H- Hello? Is somebody out there? Please, I need help.”

The voice had a refined quality to it, lacking any real rasp or wheeze. Kujal approached, and the rustling of bushes followed with him.

“Oh, by the grace of Old Myarsa! Hello old codger!” The voice was calling out from a rare break in the treeline, and low to the ground. At the center of the glade, sunk down into the muck such that only her head and one of her arms was above the surface was a woman. A pale woman, middle aged, and robust from the look of her shoulders. She bore the robes of a conservator, now all sullied by her splashing about.

“I seem to have gotten stuck,” She continued, “Until just now, I was quite sure that I was going to be dragged down into the depths. I don’t feel any mud-demons, haven’t seen any around, but oh, I’m sure they’d love to see one such as me in so vulnerable a state. Quite sure, halfway swallowed into their big greedy swamp-mouth already. Quite sure.”

“No, no, we can’t be having the swamp take you.” Kujal agreed matter of factly, meandering around the side of the quagmire so as to get a better view of it’s consistency.

A beat passed without motion between them, Kujal just watching, before the conservator woman cleared her throat awkwardly, “So, would you kindly help a maid out of this boghole?”

“No, no, I don’t think we’ll be doing that either.” Kujal held that same shuffling tone. From his laden side, he pulled out a heavy moss-covered tome and began to thumb through it.

“I- I’m sorry, what do you mean?” The woman’s voice fell back into a touch of disquiet.

Before he thought to answer, Kujal found the page he was looking for. Etched into its paper there were jagged, spiraling symbols, diagrams of muck, vine, and man, and the way that the three might become one.

“Wiks R’ud”, Kujal called the words of power absentmindedly, and it floated out from the book along a line of mired energy to the soles of his feet.

“Now, chap, what’s all this about?” The woman began to tense in her hold, flinching fruitlessly against the sucking sludge. Kujal walked his waddling walk towards her, treading impossibly across moss-filled water and the slough that had captured her as though it were the most solid of ground.

“You’re going to save me, aren’t you?” The woman looked up to him with a desperate hope that only barely masked the terror burgeoning from within her.

“You’ll have your place, dearie.” Kujal pulled a trembling hand up to his wrinkled lips to give a curt whistle, and from the brush behind two crocodiles emerged. Vilppu and Tuukka were piteous creatures, taken by plant life and fungus, long having passed along their mortal coil. Moss bound their sloughing hide to their bones in place of flesh, everywhere except for their toothed snouts which had been picked to sheer yellowed bone, and from their eye sockets burst the stalks of mottlecapped mushrooms.

The woman could only scream as they slunk beneath the surface of the pond.

Kujal continued to circle the woman in slow, deliberate movements. He leafed from page to page, pulling from them pressed spores to sprinkle across her eyelids and jam into her ears.

“Cec’brol Mlewsum R’ud Yld’eag”, he chanted over and over and over again.

“Please, please don- AHGHAG!” He heard her screams go sharper, and knew that his pets had reached her. It would not be long now. In her state of shock, as her entrails were pulled out by fang and claw and swamp water flooded into the cavity, he heard her muttering to herself “Why, why, why, why, why.”

Kujal paused his chant. “We all must live, here in this place. To survive against the swamp. And for some to live, others must die. Now, die, and live again.”

The woman’s head was pulled fully below the water, and she was silent.

Kujal resumed his chant, tome in hand, and at the moment where he felt the slip from life to death beneath his feet he slammed the book shut with a final call, “Jecompterata”!

When the body reemerged, it crawled and clawed it’s way out of the pit. It was filthy with moss and mud, most of which spilled out of the bloody wound sported in it’s stomach. It stood in a shambling mockery of life, having defied the swamp its meal as any good conservator should.
Wherever It Drew (One Shot)

18th of Nemulum, 316 EA

Peyr Myarsa

Irec had never shown much interest in the circumstances of his own life.

He lived well, on high in Peyr, he came from a good family. He married at a young age, just as his herbalism practice was rising to the forefront on the upper decks of the city. His wife was named Estrid, and she was not anybody he had known well before pulling her up to be courted but she had an insistent way about her and he had not needed much convincing. They had a baby, and named that baby Mepka. All the while, he followed along the pull of obligation wherever it drew.

More often than he would have liked, it drew him in the direction of the temple. He was a conservator. Devout, in his own way, though he had not considered with any particular clarity what it would be like to be any other way. His father had urged him into a position as a steward, and so he bore the iron axe when it was required of him.

It was not so bad a detail for him to take, walking priestly nobles through the muck. The swamp was surely as repulsive to him as any other conservator, there was no doubt to the fact that he preferred his greenhouse, but traipsing through gave him time to muse on his work and the opportunity to scout out new growths from which to harvest for his alchemy. Poultice and potions, elixirs and brews. Herbs to heal and herbs to cure. He would pass the time, cataloguing them in his mind. In those rare moments when the fen would rise up, ambush them, he flailed wildly and prayed that the others would take care of the threat. They always did.

He’d return home to Peyr in those days, in Mepka’s childhood, and find himself in an entirely new world. Estrid was her usual excitable self, but his daughter seemed to grow in the blink of an eye. She was often surprising to him, not because he held her adolescent mind in any particularly high esteem but rather because the spans between which he took the time to engage her grew long.

Foraging was the exception. Mepka took to the swamp young, and after the first time he brought her out to collect herbs with him he could not stop her from begging to come with each time he did.

He was happy to meet her on the ground he felt solid on. She was a font of questions, and so by those excursions he would pour his singular knowledge out into her. Leaves and berries, stems and roots. Herbs to heal and herbs to cure. He never felt closer to her than during those callow days, stomping around the swamp.

She passed them quickly, though, or at least it seemed so to Irec. First she would just leave his sight momentarily, drawn away by a hook of distraction while he was busy inspecting one specimen or another. Then she was showing intentionality, gone for an hour or so at a time, taking in the surroundings at a pace of curiosity that he could not match. It was not long before she was tracking off for excursions entirely of her own, days where he was in the city and she had her quarterstaff in hand ready to face the swamp unescorted. She could defend herself if need be, she had done it before.

He didn’t worry. He didn’t feel about it at all, really. She was his daughter, and like his wife and his church and his city and every other comfort in his life he supposed that she would stay as she was forever.
Make Me Your Sacrifice (One Shot)

167st of Gnielm, 336 EA

Peyr Myarsa

Anzaw sat high on the intricately carved bench, looking down on the procession below.

“I have done nothing with my life other than work, and even at that I’m not particularly good.” The man at the foot of the pulpit was base, kneeling and soaked through as though he had been left out in the rain. He had an unkempt lankiness to him, size without any real power to it. His name had been announced as Gavril Tumash, at the beginning of the trial. “I have no idea how I know these words, why the swamp listens to me. You call me warlock, and I do not know what that means, but what I do know is that I just want to live my life. I pose no threat to you. Don’t exile me, please, I beg you.”

Glancing around, Anzaw noted that few of the other devoted conservators were paying attention. Even fewer had brought ceremonial axes such as his, if they had even been granted them.

“It is a fateful thing, to have been touched by the swamp so.” Najdan presided, elder figure as they were, hunched and slow to speak. “Your existence here is profane in and of itself, a weapon for the enemy, but we cannot allow you to fall out into the muck and land in that same enemy’s hand. It is not ideal, but we have no choice but to allow you to stay.”

Anzaw shifted to standing, moving at a steady pace down the stairs to the centerline of the communion chambers. His shoulders were pulled back straight, his posture no more rigid than normal. To any others there, he must have seemed to have just been excusing himself.

Before anyone could realize what was happening, Anzaw was at the prisoner’s level. He could see the vertebra lined down the gaunt man’s back, poking out past skin and threadbare garment. He lifted his axe without breaking his stride, and sunk it straight through Gavril’s flesh down a perfect target of the man’s spine.

There was no lack of attention then, gasps going up as a warlock of the swamp fell to the ground gasping vacantly in wretched righteous pain.

“Make me your sacrifice, I give my honor for the honor of all Conservatorship.” Anzaw declared out to the adjudicator in iron confidence, throwing his axe to the ground and feeling the weight of the entire room on him, “Cast me out to penance. I will serve, for what I have done here, and do so willingly. This man was stained, his blood mired by filth. By killing him I have sullied myself, I do not deny it, but this was a necessary act for the maintenance of order here. No less.”
Beneath the Swamp (One Shot)

29th of Gnielm, 334 EA

Peyr Myarsa, Illiara

Daakar moved beneath the swamp, and in their wake the earth swallowed up the petty humans above.

It was retributive, really, sating hunger to overlay their loss. The one who had learned the Aether’s word had gotten away, fled and abjured them as though they were not god here. The rest of these, the conservators, they were nothing. Fodder that had grown too proud, and so would be dragged out of the air they so preciously craved.

Daakar retreated in turn, deeper and deeper still beneath the heaving ground, leaving the parts of themselves that were the mephits to cavalcade over the stragglers. They would drown them, pull them down, break their bodies and promise to tear their profane city apart.

And still, that they had let that one slip through their fingers, it vexed them greatly. That creature was theirs to hold, theirs to drown. It was foul to them, to have lost even one.

They descended to an bygone place, a place that had once been their prison and had now become their domain, Old Myarsa. It was all sunken beneath Daakar now, save for an old wreck of a temple and the peaking facade of a few towers. The buildings were packed with clay, the streets lined with the bones of many generations of humans from the surface. Daakar was the only one who could feel this place anymore, the only one who truly knew what it contained. It was all theirs.

They remembered when the aether came to this world, the war and the panic of the Evenfall leading up to it. They remembered the feeling of tearing filling every fiber of their being as they writhed on the floor of the crystalline cell the Myarsan’s had relegated them to. They remembered waves and waves of indefinite madness, of reality itself rending.

Just as they were to fall into their fervent memories, they reached their destination. Coming from the center of Daakar’s lair, in a darkness so pure that it can only be achieved by moving through the packed sediment layer without disturbing it, radiated out a feeling of warmth. From there they felt their tendrils reaching, forming, spreading out into glorious voracity. They commanded such forces as the ground and the water and the trees which were life itself.

They wrapped their body, their true dao body, jealously around the source of this power. A scroll, buried by time and poor circumstance, on which was written the lost name of a god. And it was theirs, it was only theirs.
Spaces Between Where We Are Sure (One Shot)

21st of Gnielm, 334 EA

Citadel of the Athalial League, Athal

Sylber saw the shape of a whisper, rippling out across endless disjointed space, and it drew him to fixation.

He was sitting, now, days later, searching in his way staying perfectly still. A tapestry of starlight adorned the ceiling above him erudite symbols representing all that had ever been seen. A living network, nodes of real space and faintly pulsing threads like trails of comets. The Dome of the Atlas, a monumentalized map of all the demiplanes explored by the Athalial League.

“To the request of guildfellow Sylber Huekrib,” the voice of an archivist, even toned and disembodied by prestidigitation, rolled out through the hall, “refocusing on the known cluster Illiara.”

The ceilings display washed over into a single solid wall of illumination, before allowing blank space back in to reform a clear picture of a subsection of the former map. All around scholars grumbled and tuned out, reorganizing their notes or rubbing rest into their eyes.

“Oy, Sylber.” A voice, leaning over from behind, whispered. It was one he knew well enough, Jolien’s. They had come up together through the Commission of Discernment, before she fell fully under the sway of Reach ideology and switched tracts onto the Commission of Naturalization. “What’s the deal? Illiara’s a dead zone, tread back and forth. Why pull the focus?”

“I’m not sure, yet.” Sylber thumbed his quill, eyes still locked up to the ceiling. “There were some readings coming off of a waystation out there, anomalies in the aether. Something incongruous.”

“Well fuck, Syl,” Jolien let out a snort, “Illiara’s got the highest concentration of wild magic zones anywhere on the lattice, it might as well be nothing but anomalies. If your goal is to carve any gen coming out of that clusterfuck into a reasonable shape you’ll be whittling your whole career.”

“This is different.” Sylber said simply, fingers tracking over paper notes he had brought with him.

“Oh, sorry, my mistake,” Jolien spoke a little bit too loudly to be anything other than mocking, “This is different everybody. Raise the banners. I thought the whole dome was being held up from actual research on a lark, but this, this is different.”

“What’s your problem, Jolien?” Sylber’s brow furrowed, peeved.

“My problem is that Illiara is a waste of your talent. It’s been on the board for two centuries, and in that time how much has it gotten the League? Barely anything. We’ve walked the length and breadth of it, but it’s so fraught that nobody wants to settle there. It’s worthless.” She paused long enough to slug down the dregs of her tea. “Why not focus that beautiful big brain of yours on something wholly new, something nobody’s ever touched before?”

“That’s not how this works. That’s not it at all.” Sylber’s posture remained still as he explained, “We’re here to explore, to discover. To learn. I am, at least. And you don’t get to learn something from nothing. There have to be reference points. New knowledge comes when you think on the spaces between where we are sure.”

And just at that moment, the quantities fell into place.

“Spaces between.” Sylber mumbled to himself.

“What was that?” Jolien asked, again too loudly.

“Look, there and there.” Sylber pointed up towards two parallel streams of planar links, flattened from circular to a subtle oval in their constituent map. “I read those planes as Elohnih and the Sylva of the Three Takes. Is that right?”

“What? Yeah, that’s what it says there. What about them?” Jolien leaned over the back of the chair further.

“Look at these metrics.” Sylber held up the scrawled parchment for Jolien to examine. “From the waystation on Elohnih. The tensile undulation in its perpendicular connecting leylines, the way it modulates as a fixed point against the centrifugal rotation that that cycle it’s a part of should be exhibiting. Three Takes does the exact same thing, equal but opposite. That shouldn’t happen, unless-”

“Unless there was a leyline between the two of them that wasn’t listed on the map.” Jolien finished the thought, glibness giving way to dawning understanding.

“Exactly.” Sylber’s words tumbled over each other excitedly, “There’s a gap between them, one that we didn’t know to fill until something started making noise inside of it. And I’d stake my heart on the guess that it’s not just a leyline between them, I think there’s a whole new demiplane. Otherwise where in all hells would the disturbance be coming from in the first place?”

The two sat a moment, staring up at the empty space between the two blinking dots meant to symbolize entire worlds.

Sylber stood suddenly, a flurry of movement as he began collecting the papers that had worked him up to this revelatory thought. “I’m going. I’ll have provost Grejyre post a contract, she’s out in that direction last I heard, and I’ll take it myself. I think you should come to.”

A beat passed, and Sylber cracked a knowing smile. “Who knows what we’ll find, now that we’ve found it.”