"I can't... keep up, even with... magic."
"Worry not, I help."
The giant grabbed Wraithvine, his young mage apprentice, Gikka, and the cat, put them on their shoulders, and kept running. Time was running out, that bad storm was getting closer, and safety was a distance yet. -- Anon Guest
Cikaros ran hell for leather, feet making craters in the otherwise blasted landscape. Normally, she would have to step carefully to avoid villages, hamlets, and isolated cottages, but nobody came to the Desolate Moors for a reason. Reason one was that the whole place was the result of a magical war in eons past.
Reason two was the storm that was gaining on them. One strike of Wild Magic could change someone's life forever.
There were things living in the Desolate Moors that owed their existence to the Wild Magics there.
Wraithvine, and therefore Wraithvine's companions, were there to at least try to fix it. It had taken Wraithvine some significant centuries to gain all the necessary ingredients to do it. And since the situation would never get better without hir intervention, they were all now hurrying for the nearest place of safety.
Ironmount.
Thanks to centuries of Wild Magic, the iron in the mountain range was both magic-resistant and heavily magical. People had attempted expeditions for even as much as a single gram. Many lives were lost in those efforts, but they tried nonetheless.
Wraithvine used hir magics to loan Cikaros some extra speed. Ze threw up a protective shield, just in case. Strodius added his own magics to the defences.
"I see a cave," she managed, leaning into her desperate run. "It might be big enough."
Gikka, clinging for her life to some of Cikaros' hair, had begun to pray. Situations like this made Clerics out of everyone.
Whether it was Wraithvine's magic, Gikka's prayers, or Cikaros' feet, something worked. The giant and her passengers slid into a cavern just as the landscape lit up with several Wild Magic strikes at once.
Hills sprouted out of nothing. Crystal shapes formed and collapsed. Bugs were enlarged to draconic scales or transformed into other creatures. A portal to Nanogh erupted and spat out a few luckless sprites that soon perished in a wall of fire.
The party clung to the nearest rusty stalagmites and winced.
"Do we wait for it to stop?" asked Gikka.
"It'll never stop," murmured Wraithvine from experience. Ze had a wand made of unicorn horn, tipped with pyrite and inlaid with starmetal. "You should get as deep as you can. This is going to take some time." Wraithvine began writing runes of protection around the entrance with the wand. Enough to keep them all safe during the rest of the ritual.
That was one of the few nice things about being immortal. Wait long enough, and even the most impossible of components can be obtained. Some had been waiting in Wraithvine's pockets for millennia.
It would take days, of course, but Ironmount would be connected to the rest of the world's leyflow, and thus begin to drain the excess magic from the Desolate Moors.
In the meantime, Strodius could practice his more practical spells, like creating food and water for those with him. Or cleaning things, given the rust dust everywhere.
Turning it back into habitable land might take even more millennia, but that was something Wraithvine was prepared to work on.
Even immortals needed their hobbies.
[Photo by Pierre Châtel-Innocenti on Unsplash]
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