023 - Ashakir I: Arrivals
“Our society is predicated on hierarchy. The wise Origa and the Arila who assist them lead the People. The Karravar preside over matters magical while the godly orders of the Darra direct matters divine. Together, they ward off the Dark. The learned Kirra and skilled Dirra then form the backbone of the Republic. After them are the Shorra who handle money and navigate trade, and the Merra who toil and work to better the lives of the People. Then, below them all, are the Vekalan, who must never be counted amongst our number…”
—An Academy text describing the various castes of the Varran Republic, published 736 Y.S.
Eight days after leaving Outpost Avna, Ai finally breathed in the nearly overwhelming scent of Ashakir. She’d been stuck in a carriage for most of the journey over, trying to figure out how to finagle a detection spell for the Burned Brands.
The atmosphere here was intoxicating. The very air was a blend of flavors: peppery, sweet, and earthy spices, laid over foundational notes of charcoal smoke, ocean, and the musky warmth of large pack animals. The sheer depth and density—not to mention the pungency—was utterly unlike anything Ai had ever experienced before.
She’d been here before, during the game. Early in the Dirge storyline, Ashak had been a glorified fishing hamlet, a cluster of wooden shacks clinging desperately to the coastline while Player guilds fought over the old Ve’un anchored in the bay.
Now, Ashakir was a thriving city that stretched across the entire coastline.
From the north, the great Hill of Ashak for which the city was named shone in the sunlight, blue and white buildings lining streets that wound up the entire hill. To the southeast, the aquamarine waters of the Tranquil Sea sparkled in the harsh sunlight as they bled into Ashak Bay. Seabirds and birds and flying reptiles—dar—of all sizes and shapes flew across the horizon, hoping to catch a meal by following the Varran sailships that floated in the Bay.
Being in this new place was absolutely liberating.
It almost hadn’t felt worth being forced to travel by Golga caravan again, especially knowing that she and Aru could have zipped ahead on their own. It would’ve been a simple matter of asking for directions or a map. But she had said she was going to help Benessel. And she enjoyed chatting with Sari.
Besides, while she loved Aru to death and beyond, even she was starting to feel lonely without her guildmates’ banter to lighten the mood. Being around Sari and her mentor helped more than she was willing to admit.
So she buckled down and got it done.
It was easy for her personally to sense the Brands, on account of how deeply her Semblance ran through the fabric of reality. To use a crude analogy, those who bore the char of the Brand swam around in the figurative ocean that was her Semblance, polluting its waters with their every breath. This made them rather impossible to miss if she was paying any sort of attention.
The first step was to make a spell that she could have cast during the game era. She would still have been a SS-Rank Semblance tryhard, able to earn her living on a character narrative content distribution deal with the devs. But she wouldn’t have been nearly as obscenely powerful as she had become these days. Long story short, it was quite tricky to translate her personal magical senses into a chain of concepts that a modern Varran could learn.
She figured out that part in about an hour, and the only reason it even took that long was that she only had Inneol’s dead Brand to work with.
Still, the design of the Brands was ingeniously insidious, to put it lightly. Where any other spell would have been slowly carved, or perhaps pressed into reality like a stamp, the Brand instead wormed itself through the substrate of existence. It behaved like a parasite, weaving itself into and through the tapestry of thoughts and beliefs that comprised the world around it. All of that was to say that each instance of the Burned Brand was like a Gordian knot and cutting it would most certainly kill its bearer.
She still wasn't quite sure just how the Brand’s designers had done it—and she was sure it was multiple designers from the jarring juxtaposition of the Brand's structure, its tithing mechanism, and its explosively combustible functions. There was just no way there was only one mind behind its design.
But because all she had to work with was the thoroughly burned out Brand on the equally burned out Inneol, that was about the extent of what she could figure out right now.
Ai’s thoughts turned to Inneol, whose comatose body they were also transporting to Ashakir. She wasn't going to ask what his fate was going to be. She had a good idea of what was waiting for him. If not wanting to put him under her protection made her a bad person, then so be it.
No, the real spellweaving problem lay in figuring out a semiotic structure that could be cast by someone whose Semblance was even weaker than Benessel's. It was meant to be distributed widely as a broad-purpose spell.
Benessel was no pushover, to be sure. She couldn't just ask him about in-game statistics that he had no frame of reference for, so all she had were her own estimates. Eyeballing it still placed him at the cusp between A and S-Rank, or perhaps at low S-Rank. Since he was supposed to be one of the most skilled mages currently serving in the Republic, that meant she had to scale the spell down even further.
Ai ended up managing to figure it out on Day Four of their trip from Avna to Ashakir. Four whole days! Ridiculous.
It’d taken the rest of their journey for Benessel to learn to cast the spell—apparently her weave was “convoluted” and “unreasonably complex”. But he managed it in the end as well.
If she had access to a live Brand, on a subject willing and able to give their consent to her studying it, she'd have managed it in half the time. She thought of Lellen and Povi back in Outpost Avna, and felt her resolve tighten. She'd figure out how to help them, and anyone else they came across who was cursed with a Brand.
Ai took a deep breath again, reveling in the life that surrounded her.
Life in Tokyo had been all artificial air-fresheners and smog before she’d retreated into her apartment, and moldy, musty apartment-smell for the eight years that followed. The simulated sights, sounds, and smells she experienced in Dirge had been much more exciting, that was for sure, but they were nothing in comparison to the real thing. Even Outpost Avna had been a torrent of new smells and experiences for Ai, but the streets before her were on another level.
If Ashakir was a living organism, then the main street was an artery that cut straight from the city gates down into an as-yet unseen heart of the city. The entire thing was one roiling, shouting, and vibrant marketplace, selling everything from preserved fish sauce to construction materials to valuable trade goods.
The chaos was such that Ai was glad that they’d dropped off Balala with the garrison back at the city gates. Benessel had quoted protocol, but practically speaking, there was no telling what an Orgawyr might do in such a packed city, no matter how well-behaved she was under Sari’s tender care.
Ai ran her fingers over [Eye of the Storm] as it lay ensconced in her robe pocket. If only her friends were here to see this city with her.
“Ayle!” Benessel called out from his carriage seat atop a taxi Golga, pulling Ai out of her thoughts. The beast grunted loudly as its driver pulled on the reins to keep it from moving.
“The Republic thanks you for your aid. Rest assured that [Burned Radar] will be shared throughout my organization as soon as possible—though I confess I still don’t understand what a [Radar] is and why it works the way it does…”
He coughed.
“No matter. Sarila! I am headed to the Karravar Office to make my report. We’ll rendezvous at Seventh Drum this evening. Remember, we meet at the Guiding Star Inn by the docks, as usual!” With that, he gestured at the taxi driver, who finally let his Golga walk off with a baying squawk into the busy Ashakir main street.
“Later, Benessel!” Ai watched Benessel disappear into the crowd, before turning to Sari, “As usual? Do you two come to Ashakir often?”
“Not so often to be able to say we come here often. In the three years since I became his Aspirant, I think we’ve passed through here maybe four times? But we stay at the Guiding Star every time.” Sari responded.
Ai nodded for her to go on.
“Honestly, I used to think Master Benessel was such a stick in the mud, but he’s very good friends with the owners of the Guiding Star. The first time we came to Ashakir and stayed there was the only time I’ve ever seen him drunk, actually,” Sari continued, smiling at the memory, “In any case, we have the day to ourselves, Miss Ayle. I’m no local, but I’m sure I can show you around.”
“In that case,” Ai began, “I want to make the most of our time here. I’d like to look for local legends, myths, tall-tales. Anything that sticks out.”
Her guildmates would have inevitably gotten involved with the locals, their exploits twisted into local legends and bar-room tales at the very least. Knowing the shenanigans they’d get up to without her supervision, she was quite certain there’d be at least something here.
Ai and Sari began walking down Ashakir’s main street, at times pushing their way through the crowd of busy city folk going about their business.
“Anything that sticks out?” Sari responded as they passed by a fishmonger—and had to pull a suddenly-interested Aru away from the vendor.
“Yeah, anything out of the—No, Aru! Wait until lunch.” Ai said to the disgruntled lizard-dog, who harrumphed as if to demand the food and attention that he so rightly deserved. She relented with a sigh and scratched his head while they walked.
“Anyway, as I was saying. Local legends.”
Sari tilted her head to the side in confusion. “I thought you’d want to look for traces of your friends. There’s lots of traffic between Ashakir and Ikkasir, after all, and Ashakir is quite a storied city on its own merits.”
“This is looking for them, Sari. Trust me.” Ai said, keenly aware of how vague the story she’d given Sari and Benessel had been, especially with how she hadn't expected Ikkasir to have become anchored by the Varrans over the years.
In any case, Ai would take any goodwill they were offering her in spite of her suspicious background. It was true that she desperately wanted to find her guildmates, but she couldn’t deny that all things considered, the two of them were growing on her, Sari’s curiosity and earnest demeanor especially.
“Right, well. We have until the evening, so there’s plenty of time. What’s available?” She continued, taking Sari’s inquisitive expression in stride.
“Hmm. I suppose most original resources would have been taken to Varranir, at the Citadel Library.”
“We’re not in Varranir. What’s here?”
Sari thought for a moment, her brow furrowed. “Well, the Academy does have a branch in Ashakir—they’d have a decently large library. Though I doubt it comes close to the Citadel’s. I could get us access, and it’s right next to the Norric Temple, which might hold historical records from the time as well…”
Those sounded promising, perhaps. But Ai wasn’t looking for the official narrative of a nation she suspected would be quite stringent in controlling its official narrative. Ai was more accustomed to hunting down lore from ancient ruins and NPC dialogue. Besides, the ethnographer in her yearned to do some fieldwork.
“Wish you could’ve left some more clues for me, [Stormold],” Ai muttered under her breath, hand once again in her pocket around Eye of the Storm.
“Storm-old…? You mean… The Old Storm?” Sari’s head snapped up, filled with a sudden energy.
She took a half-step closer, her voice dropping to an excited whisper. “The sailors and merchants in this city are particularly devout. If you’re interested in real legends, then we should go to the Temple of Storms.”
And there it was. [Stormold], you old dog. Apparently they named a temple after you, Ai thought to herself.
“The Temple then,” Ai said, her decision instant. “Take me to this Temple of Storm’s.”