Quendalon/Session03LiDreams
The boat slid upstream, rocking in the gentle swells of the Yanaze River. One of the many passenger ferries that plied the routes between the Riverlands cities, it was really more of a flat-bottomed barge - not at all like the ocean-going vessels that Li had grown up around. A bout of homesickness suddenly came over the young Solar. Since leaving Orchid, she had been so entranced by the strangeness of the places she had been, or caught up in the excitement and terror of her adventures that she hadn’t even had time to be homesick. But here was something she knew, something familiar and yet so utterly different, for these waters were not the pure blue deeps of her homeland but muddy and brackish.
Torvald and the rest of the passengers were asleep; some in cabins below deck, many on the deck itself, rolled up in blankets out of the way of the crew. The night watch was small, only a pilot and three other river men. Li was alone with her thoughts, watching the banks of the river slide slowly by, dimly lit by the moon and stars.
As the boat continued upstream, a large stone monument reared itself up upon the south bank. Broken, worn by great age, the grey monolith resembled a single crumbled column, a hundred feet high and at least thirty in diameter. Li stared at it and something in the back of her mind recognized. It was a strange feeling, like déjà vu, but stronger and it was much like when she first laid eyes on Torvald’s face - seeing something for the first time and yet knowing it nonetheless.
All at once, she was somewhere else and someone else. A tall man in a golden breastplate - no, an orichalcum breastplate - and flowing robes stood at her side. It was morning, the Unconquered Sun only a fingerbreadth over the horizon and the two Exalted were in the garden beneath the Rock of Aiur. The Rock towered five hundred feet above them, a testament to the spot where Aiur had laid down his life for the sake of his Lunar wife, Satl-Xol. Around it spread a great garden, maintained lovingly by the ancient Satl-Xol, the great No Moon sorceress with quicksilver magics. Li and her companion leaned close to a flower bush, covered in gorgeous blue and white blossoms, to watch a green and pink hummingbird sip from the cups. Its wings beat so fast they were nearly invisible and Li watched it flit speedily and gracefully from flower to flower.
Suddenly, she laughed and drew her daiklave. With a shout, she brandished it and leapt into the air while her companion looked on. The Essence of the Sun burned within and around her. The daiklave flashed out twice in thin air, so quickly it practically disappeared. Li twisted in air and landed with a flourish.
Her companion laughed in delight. “What,” he asked in a deep basso, “do you call that?”
She spoke in an unfamiliar voice and said, “I call it ‘Hummingbird Takes Flight.’”
“How poetic.”
The Rock of Aiur slipped by in the moonlight to the aft of the river barge. Li shivered on the deck in the autumn wind, drew her cloak tightly around her. She stretched out a single hand and silently, slowly mimed the movements from her vision. She mouthed the unfamiliar words of that ancient tongue of the Old Realm: ‘Hummingbird Takes Flight.’ She dropped her arm and she shivered again, but not from the chill wind.
(Li's new combo consists of the following Charms: Excellent Strike + Hungry Tiger Technique + One Weapon Two Blows.)
