The Cosmic Detour

[Sighter Tnailog]

He had no time to think about what the wizard said. From the moment Anton had reappeared he knew this was trouble. A silent mind-message to Hilmandil and a few others in the back room was all he had before all hell broke loose. They had been planning for this eventuality a long time. He could hear the thrum of the portal as it activated; he would have only a few moments to get through it before it closed forever, and he knew that Hilmandil and the others were already through.

A sword appeared in his hands again, this time a plain steel blade. Ainalindil's unsheathing in war was for another time and place. With the other hand, he produced a throwing knife, spearing one of the enforcers in the eye before he could recover his senses. With a cry the one who called himself Cildorian jumped up onto the countertop, then leaped from it to plunge the sword deep into the chest of the other enforcer.

He tried to release and let go, after which he planned to flee from whence he came, fly through the portal, and escape. But it was not to be so. The wyrmian he had stabbed choked down the pain and grabbed the elf by the shoulder. He brought his other fist around to crunch, with an excruciating crack, into the elf's face.

The body crumpled to the floor, lifeless.

* * * * *

"And thus, in the world yet to be, passes Findelfin ap Fingolfin, named Cildorian, whose hand never again rose in defiance of his enemies.

"Quite an unsatisfactory end to our little saga, don't you think?" The voice now came from nothing; Findelfin stood alone, unclothed, wrapped in the light that seemed to be from everything and from nothing.

"I think so too, Findelfin ap Fingolfin. And so I send you back, with the hope that you'll tell everyone how nice I was, remember your gods, and please try to do your best to avoid that disaster in Kilya Gorge. If I may give you a hint; prayer never hurt anybody. Acolyte Xem, he prayed."

And then the voice rung with the boom of years uncounted, and in that moment even the eldest of the immortals on the planes of existence would have felt as a child.

"Now Go. My gift will be with you when you depart."

And the world was changed.

Spoils Request:

I would like a rosary. It is to be of seven sections, each section containing seven beads. The materials are expensive, and so I am asking that you consider my thread "Slings and Arrows," "The Field of Sighs and Sorrows," and "Beyond the Bridge of Souls," as well as the work of this thread, in approving this. Also, since this thread is of appropriate length, I would like to request an official judging. Here is the spoil.

The first section of beads is of diamond, in honor of Aurient, the star-mother, whose soul surpasses all gems on earth and whose spirit of adamant will stand ever firm in the face of danger.

The second section is of amber, each bead containing a small insect. Amber is the stuff of Galatirion, for it traps life within life and holds something like a soul in its rough resin. Amber is for Galatirion, the giver of life.

The next section is of black coral. Smooth and hard, this coral once held in it the breath and salt of the sea; it is the representative of Earlon the Rain-Star, whose gift of the sea must be recovered and cherished by the Raiaerans.

The fourth section is resplendent ivory, each bead carved with a likeness of Arddunwë, the Sweet-Star. Each depiction represents a different mode of beauty; young and old, male and female, living and dying, and Holy Other.

The fifth section honors Cuarye, the Swift-Star, and is of simple yew wood. The simplest and cheapest of the materials in this rosary, it calls the bearer to remember that the heart of Holy is not only in the trappings of wealth, but in simple lives and simple people; and it also reminds those who wield the Bow that simple weapons are often the best.

The sixth section is of smooth mythril. All other materials on this rosary are of substances that were once alive; even diamonds were once coal, which was once the stuff of trees and life. But in honoring Megillion, the Silver-Star whose gift is metal and its working, the prayers of the rosary remind the living to remember the dead; and that, in the end, metal is only a purveyor of death and not a means to final life.

The final section is of crystal glass, and set in these crystals is the living light of Findelfin's own memory. Each crystal evokes a different type of memory: people, places, events, things, evils, and lore. And the final crystal conjures the strongest memory of all: the memory of the star-gods in their glory before the elves were sent to earth. When Findelfin holds each bead, the memories associated with this bead will become more acute.

The sole power in this rosary is that it is somehow connected to Findelfin; no one can touch it besides himself, and the only power it has exists in its connection to Findelfin. Any powers it does have will be uncovered through threads, and not here.

Thanks for considering this spoil.

[Caden Law]

It bears mention that, even in matters where Gods are concerned and Time and Space are being ripped apart and krazy-glued back together, Elves tend to get the better end of things. Case in point: Findelfin effectively gets a first class send-off and a ride home to match, whereas Caden spent the jaunt quite literally tumbling through Infinity in much the same way your average Coach passenger goes homicidally insane while trying to block out screaming babies to one side, Gremlins on the wing, and an arguement between a rabid Trekkie and a LARPing Jedi Knight.

Complete with terrible flight attendants and that godawful Dungeons and Dragons movie for in-flight entertainment.

Put into more practical terms: Caden and Anton went down the timestream fighting like drunks who were trying to drown each other without being drowned in turn. Clocks flew by, a couch smacked into them and bounced off, a token catboy went screaming through space and oh, look, a TARDIS with a functioning Chamelon Circuit. Blood leaked out like molten ice around where Caden's scalpel had embedded in Anton's throat, and his other arm shook with effort as he tried to get close enough to rake his bowie across Anton's face and eye. The attempt was blocked by an elbow pressed into his own, and the same hand was wrapped rather awkwardly around the side of his head while Anton's other arm struggled to keep the scalpel from going any deeper or cutting into the major veins that it had so barely missed...

...and somewhere in the midst of all of this, there was kicking. The sort that crumpled Caden's already long-battered chestplate.

The whole way through, they jousted as much verbally as they did with blades and actions. Anton tried every Curse he knew, Caden spat back in a dozen different languages and twenty more that he actually didn't know, and none of it even made sense. Words have no meaning to Time, not even Words of Power.

"die Why ?you just don't," garbled its way out of Anton's mouth, completely out of synch even with the cords in his throat.

"yourself , Strike prick," was Caden's equally unsynched reply, actually spoken before the thing it was responding to.

This continued on. For twenty years and a bunch of spare change measured in worlds and possibilities; Time without time, moving as mortal minds cannot comprehend it. N'Thayn'sal became Althanas, the Reaper Queen went laughing madly backwards into her grave and Scara Brae imploded back into being. Things vanished from where they'd fallen and burned, and beings and forces unmeasured went backstepping into their crypts, their vaults, and their places of power.

Ah...almost there...

Time snapped. The Universe shuddered a bit, and those in tune with the Fourth Wall would've felt it when it happened. Maybe a few of the crazier ones would've seen the changes as chaos butterflies went up in smoke and the Timestream jarred itself onto a new course. With this, the Wizard and the Warlock were literally vomited from nothing; out of what may as well be thin air and desolation somewhere far north of civilization's reaches. They emerged with loud, raging screams, from a direction that could never possibly be named, and without a single special effect to show for it. They were just there, suddenly and inexplicably.

Together they hit the snow and finally rolled away from each other. Anton was fast, but shaken, and Caden had gotten very good at dealing with adrenaline rushes over the past few days; he was up faster and louder and with magic flowing into his bowie and scalpel. Anton was on his knees by the time Caden came down on him, but the Warlock wasn't to be taken easily. An elbow to the chest and Caden's chestplate buckled with a hard crunching sound; he staggered back and lost his footing, and Anton sprang back onto his hands, first one and then the other with his legs jarring out in rapid succession. Boots slammed into Caden and sent him spinning to the ground.

By then, Anton was standing straight and weaving his hands through the air as violet light sprang from his pinky rings and--

"Zieg! Sadoh! RIP HIM APART!"

Caden winced at the sound of that Voice, so easily conjured. He winced harder at the flash of purple to accompany it, and the wreaking stench of brimstone and the unbearable sensation that he was about to die just as Greyspine said he would -- bloody, screaming, and after all of his magicks had failed him.

"...what?"

Except for the part where nothing happened. Anton stared at his hands in utter shock. Caden registered this in an instant, stood up with a spin and crossed knife against scalpel with a shout; magic rippled between the blades and shot forward, visible as nothing but a thin blue blur in the air. Anton saw it coming only belatedly, but still brushed it aside like it was nothing. It took him a moment after that, during which time Caden had the presence of mind to start thinking the classic Prayer of Rincewind: Oh shit oh shit oh shit I am going to die!

"There are two things I want to know, Wizard, and you are going to tell them to me now," Anton Spoke, his Sorcerous Voice carrying the twin weights of power and anger. Against the literal pressure of it, Caden couldn't help but comply. "What did you do to my Familiars?"

"...I cut them off."

Even if he did so by lying through his teeth, and even if all this did was to infuriate the Warlock more.

"Liar!" Anton declared, his Voice ringing so violently that the snow impacted for thirty feet around both of them. Caden shuddered, but hid it well.

"Touchy?" he asked, ironically trying to buy time.

Whatever the reason though, Anton seemed to calm down at this. Irritably, he reached up and laid a hand on his neck wound. It was bleeding normally now, which is to say that the cold weather of the Far North was starting to freeze it in place on his skin.

"For that matter, how did you survive my lightning?"

"Trade secret," Caden grinned.

"You can either tell me or I can rend your soul and torture you for the next seven years before casting you unceremoniously into the nearest Pit of Sorrows," Anton shot back, in a tone that almost passed for casual. Caden considered this, in the way that all men do when told this sort of thing by someone who could, in all likelihood, actually do it.

Needless to say, he reached beneath his chestplate, into his coat, and drew out the small dehlar box given him by Cildorian.

"...ah. How utterly underhanded of you."

"Is that respect I hear in your voice?" Caden asked smugly.

"Of course not. This is simply the tone I'll have when I'm finished eating your face off."

It bears mention that there's nothing quite like seeing a Wyrm smile. Few other humanoids have that many sharp teeth on display. Silence followed it, mostly punctuated only by the sound of distant winds howling through an otherwise crisp, clear, sunny day beyond the icy lakes of Evernorth. Caden put his scalpel away and lowered his knife, and the box as well.

"I think we're at a bit of an impass," he said. "You've lost most of your powers. I can use this to negate whatever's left. You don't know where you are or when you are. So let's just walk away and never meet again."

Almost as soon as he said it, Caden knew he was wrong in every possible respect. Anton cemented the notion with a loud, horrible laugh.

"That's the funny thing, Wizard! I don't need demons to do my dirty work!"

Caden dodged. Pre-emptively, because he knew he'd die otherwise. Even as he did this, Anton's right arm was already up, and purple-edged lightning shot from his fingertips. Caden avoided this, but missed the part where Anton's left arm thrust forward and a frigid, arcane blast of wind came rushing at him. Colored with an edge of blue and purple, it slammed into Caden like the wrath of the arctic, and he went down in shock. He was a hardened native of Salvar's coldest regions, and Anton dropped him like he was nothing. He landed face down in the snow and, bar a shudder here and there, did not move again.

Anton stood his ground for a while after that, still poised to throw another wall of impossible cold should the need arrise. It didn't. When it was clear that it wouldn't, he relaxed a bit.

"Poor Wizard," he said, the way that hunters do when the lion has been killed from a good, safe distance. "You should at least die happy knowing a good secret, so I'll tell you one before you go. You did strip me of most of my power. I can't feel any of my reservoirs, and my Bindings have apparently come undone because of...whatever it is that you used to pull me back in time...and yes. Yes, I can feel that too. It's exactly 3:13:55 High in the Edge of Sulgore's Axe...we're probably not at all far from Icehenge, are we?"

He paused in mid-approach, his movements languid and relaxed now. He could tell the time. He'd probably always be able to now. Place, not quite so easily. It was, Anton would eventually figure out, bleed-off from Caden's mishaps with teleportation and time travel. Just a curious side effect, nothing more or less.

"Well," Anton mused, "I guess the real question is what I'll do after I kill you. I suppose this gives me a unique opportunity to change history to my own benefit but..."

He stopped again, taking his sweet time to reach into his Warlock's Robes. From them, Anton drew a vicious, glamourous looking sword. Curved like a scimitar and glowing icy blue and inscribed with numerous red sigils. The hilt was short and curved, barely hand-and-a-half.

"But enough about me and my plans." He kicked Caden in the shoulder. Twice. Then a third time that actually had the desired effect of rolling the Wizard onto his back. "In case you don't know what this is, it's called a Magicide Blade. For your own personal reference, it's dehlar that's been enchanted. Try to figure out how when you're burning in Hell."

With a flourish and a twirl, he raised the sword up, then brought it back down...

Whatever happened next, it probably boiled down to divine intervention and/or stupidly good timing. Caden shoved his own dehlar box in the Magicide Blade's path, and two objects that were, despite all enchantments to the contrary, null magic personified, smashed into each other as the proverbial Unstoppable Force and Immovable Object. The resulting clash was enough to destroy the box in its entirety, reducing it to a spray of metallic dust across Caden's chest and arms, and the backblow from this threw Anton back several paces as he struggled to keep hold of a sword that now sang like a high-pitched bell.

As all of this was taking place, something else happened.

A wand fell from the ruins of the box, right into Caden's hands. It was about a foot and a half in length, and shaped like one continuous sword hilt of Akashiman make. The wrappings were blue-dyed leather, and each end was dominated by a blue-tinted cap of solid damascus. The actual casing was rywan beneath the leather, but the core was damascus or liviol -- it had to be. Caden could feel the shock of it through the bones of his hands. It was power made physical; a weapon meant for Greyspine himself.

And now it was his.

Incidentally, Caden was smiling like a maniac when he aimed the thing at Anton, who had only just managed to regain his balance and footing. He didn't offer any threats or insults at this point. There was no point. Caden simply focused his willpower, focused his magic and focused every ounce of energy he had to spare and let fly with a tight burst of what may as well be called, for lack of a better word, Hatred. All of the shit that had fallen on him for the past days, and every bit of indignity from being chucked through a door to being threatened and talked down to, hurting, dying by inches and being humiliated time and again -- Caden didn't just throw it at Anton, he sent it with interest and maddened glee.

All that power slammed into the Warlock before he could muster a single defense. The Magicide Blade wasn't in place to block it, he had no barriers set up and there was quite literally nothing he could've done to save himself from the attack. It hit, liquifying the snow at his feet and sending him flying a good twenty or thirty yards. Anton crashed back down with a scream, his sword thumping into snow a fair distance ahead of him, and the Warlock didn't move again for a comfortably long time.

During which, Caden just sat up, wheezing and holding his new wand with a savage look on his face. It said things better than any Voice could, defined by words like Triumph, Power, and Pride.

And then it echoed the earlier prayer-mantra of Oh shit. Which Caden himself repeated quite liberally, as Anton pushed himself up on all fours, his face a bloody mess, his robes disheveled and several teeth missing, but otherwise unphased. He dusted himself off. Took his sweet time about it, too. Then he looked at Caden and very calmly declared, "You're going to pay for that, Wizard."

...which is, of course, when the harps sang in again, from a direction that was now perpetual South. The shadows on Caden's body, and the lines in his clothes and the details of his face -- all of it lit up and turned gold. Despite himself, and despite everything else, he met the threat with a bastard's smile.

"Never next time, Warlock."

Got you.

He was gone with a flash, and the harps lilted to a distant stop just as quickly as they had arrived. Anton was left behind. Alone in the reaches of the farthest North, twenty years out of time and a world out of place.

Ten miles away, a native tribe heard his screams of rage and mistook them for angry Wendigo.

Spoils Request:

Damascus/Rywan Wand: An intricately crafted piece of work straight out of a future that will, hopefully, never come to pass. It consists of a Rywan casing around a Damascus or Liviol core, capped with Damascus at both ends. The entire thing is wrapped with blue-dyed leather strips, very much resembling the hilt of a katana. Measures in at a rough 18 inches in length. While it bears no permanent enchantments of its own, it makes for a powerful, durable focal point for Caden's magicks.

Any and all money I would've earned for my participation goes into this thing. It's the reward I want most for my participation in three FQ threads (the same ones as Findelfin). If my acquisition of it interferes with any of the spoils I requested at the end of this post from The Field of Sighs and Sorrows, then I'll readily drop almost all of them*. I leave it up to the Judge as to whether or not the wand is cored with Damascus or Liviol; either one is fine with me.

* The only one of the bunch I truly wanted was the Arcane Magic affinity. Siege Arcana will be out of Caden's reach for the foreseeable future anyway, and the Conscript equipment was mostly to stay in continuity with the Featured Quest RPs; they were likely to be destroyed at this rate anyway.

Knowledge: Timetelling: Owing to his jaunts through Time during a teleportation spell mishap, Caden has acquired the ability to give the exact time and date down to the last second, regardless of whether he has a reference or not.

Knowledge: Cosmic Positioning Sense: Owing to his jaunts through Space during that same teleportation spell mishap, Caden has gained the ability to tell where he is down to the city level, by name and even if he's never actually been there. Effectively useless for making his way through the inside of a coffee house, it's obviously no good for finding a way through mazes or dungeons either.

These are more for RP than anything else. For what it's worth, CPS will likely fade as time goes by, and only amounts to Caden being able to name whatever region, sub-region or city he's in at the time.

Besides all that, thanks to Findelfin for playing this out with me. I appreciate his help, and his tolerance of my constant badgering with questions Per his request, I'm submitting this for Judging. Thanks in advance to whoever picks it up.

BELATED EDIT: Greyspine's Grimoire does not count as a true spoil (to me, anyway). Caden won't be gleaming any magic bits from it or anything, for reasons that will be RPed when he finally reappears in the next FQ Chapter. It's just a bona fide history book with a plot purpose.

[Skie and Avery]

Quest Judging
The Cosmic Detour

STORY

Continuity ~ 6/10. This was pretty interesting, though had I not read the other FQ threads I would have been very confused.
Setting ~ 7/10.
Pacing ~ 9/10.

CHARACTER

Dialogue ~ 6/10. Plain, and sometimes a little more monologuish than I would have thought realistic when it came to an argument.
Action ~ 7/10.
Persona ~ 7/10. I think that Findelfin really shone here, as far as showing the change in him.

WRITING STYLE

Technique ~ 7/10. What hurts here, Caden is that I think you try too hard to emulate Pratchett. While writing LIKE someone else isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's bad when you try to write like them and miss the boat. Find your own style. There's nothing wrong with infusing a fantasy work with real world references and humor. But find your own voice to do it.
Mechanics ~ 8/10. There were awkward comma usage and a couple of tense mistakes I spotted. A few wrong words used, like fought instead of found. Nothing too big.
Clarity ~ 7/10. There were times when I wasn't sure what was going on, and there were some references Caden used that really threw me through a loop. Real world references aren't bad. They can be used successfully, and have been before here. Ter-Thok's writing is a prime example. However, you have to be careful with which ones you use, and how much explination you give with it. You mentioned TARDIS and Chamelon Circuits. I have no idea what those things are. It only confused me and made your joke fall flat.
MISCELLANEOUS

Wild Card ~ 7/10. Nicely done. There have been threads that play with time before, of course, but this was done well. It was interesting and relevant, and I thought the two of you pulled it off with great style.

TOTAL ~ 71/100.

Rewards

Caden Law gains 1236 EXP
Sighter Tnailog gains 1648 EXP and 85 GP

Other Spoils

Caden Law gains a Damascus/Rywan wand with liviol core, and internal GPS/clock abilities. XD
Sighter Tnailog gains the rosary as outlined.

[Witchblade]

EXP and GP added!

Sighter reaches level 9!