NOVEL WEB Ch. 12: Slyphid Instincts
The creek wound through the forest. In the distance, the sky rumbled with thunder. Cass continued to flare Foraging as she walked, finding more sorrel and vineroots at every turn.
Eventually, the trees thinned, the tall lightningwood giving way to the madrones and scraggly brush. Moist forest soil was replaced with rocky gravel, the incline of the ground sloping down before her. Sorrel became less and less common until it was replaced entirely by a weedy-looking plant with fuzzy leaves and spent flowers.
Verid’s Aster
[This flowering shrub produces bright yellow flowers in the wet season. These flowers are popular components of healing compounds by Alchemists and Herbalists for their powerful health regeneration effects and pain-dampening properties. The leaves possess a fraction of the flower’s efficacy.]
Cass didn’t know if the dried flower buds would still be any good, but she collected up as many of them and their leaves as she could fit in her pockets. Health regeneration was exactly what she wanted.
The wide shallow creek at her side narrowed, picking up speed and cutting a gash in the earth. It continued all the way up to a rocky cliff, before spilling over the edge in a narrow stream into a larger river below.
Cass stood at the top, beside her creek-turned waterfall and stared out over the landscape below.
She was in a bowl, the sides made up of tall, tree-covered mountains in every direction. Just forest and forest and more forest, as far as she could see. It rose up, touching the cloud-covered sky.
She groaned. She hadn’t known what she had been hoping to see exactly. A town maybe? Fortified walls? Some sort of outpost? Even a road?
Not more forest.
A flash of light arched through the air in the distance. A twisted tongue of lightning. It struck the woods in the distance. Thunder rumbled past her.
Cass’s eyes widened as she realized where she was standing in the open. Above thunder roared regularly, lightning snapping at the distant mountaintops.
Why was she standing on top of a hill as a thunderstorm was brewing around her?
And yet, she wasn’t the least bit scared.
Most fear existed at an instinctual level. It was something that ran underneath logic or conscious thought.
She knew she should be at least concerned standing there under the storm-filled skies as thunder rumbled in the air. Yet, she could barely summon the will to be even concerned.
Why should she, when she knew that the lightning wasn’t going to strike anywhere near here any time soon?
It was a weird thought. She traced her thoughts, trying to find where that confidence had come from. It wasn’t that the lightning couldn’t strike here. The conditions were right. There was lightning in the area. The storm extended above her. It could strike from on high at any time.
But it wouldn’t.
Her inability to explain how she knew was more distressing than anything else. She could feel it in the air. On the wind.
She pointed out over the edge of her cliff, to the right. Her eyes alighted on a patch of trees in the middle distance, over a dozen miles away. Less than thirty seconds later, lighting arched from the sky to the area she’d been pointing at. Thirteen seconds later she heard the thunder.
She frowned. She had no earthly explanation for how she had known that lightning would strike there next.
She stood there for another five minutes, pointing to points in the distance and watching as lighting struck unerringly before her. It had to be a coincidence. Another 5 minutes passed. Then another.
She was right every time.
She squinted up at the clouds. They were the same uniform grey they’d been since she’d arrived. There were no clues among them as to how she was doing this.
She wished they’d just disperse if they weren’t going to rain any time soon.
But she knew they were not going anywhere just as she knew they weren’t going to start raining.
Cass groaned and slipped into a frustrated squat atop the hill. She should just give in and accept it. She knew what was going on, and not liking it wasn’t going to make it stop.
Racial Skill Awakened: Atmospheric Sense (Lvl 1) (Racial)
[The Slyphid are as much beings of the aether as they are corporeal creatures and intuitively sense and understand atmospheric conditions the way most creatures can sense light or sound. You are no exception.]
She nodded grimly at the notification. That was what she’d thought. Now that she officially had the skill, the sensation of knowing what was going on above her was even clearer. It was no longer a vague instinct, but a sharpened one.
If forced to explain what it felt like to someone else, Cass would have been tempted to say it was like an overlay placed over her normal vision. This would have been incorrect. She stood under the tumultuous skies, thinking about it. It was more like walking through a familiar room with her eyes closed. She knew where the furniture was from a few points of touch without needing to see the entire space.
Atmospheric Sense has increased to Lvl 2!
Was that all it took? Or had she retroactively been awarded the experience from her fifteen minutes of identifying where the lightning would strike?
She decided she didn’t care, and flopped back onto the ground. Her head hurt. Her feet were tired. Her capacity for system nonsense had been exceeded hours ago.
She decided she didn’t care that it felt this good to be under open sky. And that she didn’t care that the wind rippling over the cliff’s edge felt so cleansing on her battered skin. And she didn’t care that she was absolutely certain that lightning wasn’t going to strike within three miles of her for the next week.
She was tired. She was very far from home. And she wasn’t even human anymore.