Beholden Flower of the Sun’s Desire ripped her way through the intervening Veils. Her mind was torn and weary from the long journey where she couldn’t rest, and more importantly, from fighting the mind-altering effects of the Fysallis she passed through. The hidden paths she had to traverse to reach her destination had an unusually large number of such Fysallis, and she hadn’t been prepared the first time she was ensnared. 

Desire didn’t know how long she languished in that idyllic paradise. If not for the fact that she felt her core being drained of Chaos, and her mind slowly unravelling, she would have stayed there forever. There was also the bond to her master that saved her. She couldn’t die without permission. 

After the first mind trap Fysalli, Desire went through dozens more. She didn’t know how much objective time she spent going through them, but subjectively, it was about five years. She was unsure why she felt not much objective time had passed, but she guessed it was also because of her connection to the master, even if time flow on the other end also fluctuated oddly. She didn’t know why Chaos was so bent on keeping her away, but because she had been fighting, travelling, even escaping for so long, she had gotten used to the changes in her body and power. 

“Perhaps it was also my subconscious pushing things along.”

Deep down, perhaps Desire didn’t want to show something unsightly to her beloved master.

“Hmm, where am I now?” 

The rift she’d come out of was slowly closing, and while it was still open, Chaos seeped into the new space. She looked around, then frowned.

“A strange Fysalli.” 

She was standing on a road roughly ten paces wide. There were barricades at the edges, but the view beyond it was concealed by mists. There were also steel cables rising vertically from the barricades every ten paces or so, and when she looked up, she saw they were connected to an even thicker cable running horizontally. The big cable was connected on either side to a pillar in the distance. She couldn’t see the bottom of the pillar, but the top of it rose above the mists. It actually looked more like a building, a tower, than a solid monument, though it didn’t resemble Bresian architecture. Then again, she probably wasn’t anywhere near that nation considering how long her journey had been. Anyway, it didn’t seem like it was about to end soon. 

She hummed as she focused on her connection, trying to discern which direction would lead her to her master.

“Huh?” she muttered. Even after a full minute of focus, she wasn’t able to pinpoint how she had to go.

In a Fysalli, it wasn’t so much direction as Intent that was important when travelling. She needed to go to Yuriko, and she Intended to go along the shortest way. Coupled with the trick Devotee taught her, and her nature as a Chaos Lord, Desire was able to use the hidden paths, the currents underneath, and folded spaces in the depths. 

But here…she couldn’t feel what intentions she needed to hold to walk towards Yuriko. She knew that the thread split in twain, but she also knew that she would reach Yuriko at the end of either one, but it didn’t seem to be helping now. 

She took a deep breath, then frowned. The density of ambient Chaos was low. Too low to be in the Chaos Sea. Was she in a Wyldlands of sorts? No, even if she was at the border of the zone between the Sea and a plane, she had come from the depths of Chaos and gone through the cracks. She could be anywhere. The only certain thing was that she was close, though it could be relative. After all, in a ten-year journey, being a year away from her destination could be considered close. 

“Where to go?” she muttered to herself.

She was on a bridge, so there would only be two ways to go, right? Hmmm, no. She could also jump over the railings, and land in whatever the bridge was supposed to cross. She assumed it was water, based on the prevalent mists, but it could just as easily be marshlands. The bridge could also span a valley, with the road going across one side to the other, but she didn’t feel any strong winds. Of course, being in a space shaped by thoughts meant that such natural phenomena might not apply. After all, if one had never been to such a place, how could one recreate it? 

That was only true if there was no one else to influence the formation. She knew just as well that absent one strong Will, a Fysalli would draw upon the background knowledge of the ambient Chaos. It contained everything and nothing at the same time. 

Desire peeked over the railings, but couldn’t see what was below, hidden by the mists. She instinctively knew that if she jumped over, she would cross a boundary. Where it led, she didn’t know, and the annoying thing was that the threads didn’t tell her if it was the correct way or not, just that she would leave the bridge Fysalli. 

“The safest way is along the bridge, after all,” Desire muttered.

She shrugged and picked the direction she was already facing. and casually took a stroll. Once she reached a tower, she felt the air around her grew a bit denser. She could see the boundary of a sub-layer and thought that crossing the invisible line would take her to another section. Whether it would still hold the bridge landscape or not was yet to be determined. Not wanting to waste time by vacillating over her decisions, she took a decisive step through the boundary and found herself, suddenly, at the end of the bridge. It led down into a rocky desert, and though the road continued afterwards, it looked in poor repair, with potholes, and broken sections. 

Curious, Desire followed the road, hoping to find a place to exit to the material plane. Half a longstride from the bridge, the road condition changed from dilapidated to in good repair, with clear signs of roadworks. In fact, there were a few workers removing the broken segments and others laying down the foundations for a new road. Desire stood just a dozen paces away from the workers, her presence concealed by a veil that diverted light away from her body. She wouldn’t have been able to see since light wouldn’t have reached her eyes either, but her technique was one that used Chaos, and with Intent, she twisted the way her vision worked so that even if the light didn’t reach her body, she could still interpret it and see. Not the most logical way things worked, but by spending some Chaos, she made it happen anyway. The only downside to Desire’s technique was that she had to hum, sing, play an instrument, or otherwise some kind of music to work her charms. 

‘Even if songstress is no longer in my sobriquet, music still fills me.’ she thought idly. 

The workers were human, clad in thick brown coveralls. They had ball caps with sun visors and their faces were all shaded. Desire glanced up at the Radiant Sun, then basked in its warmth for a long moment. To her, the Radiance no longer represented danger and death, but her bond with Yuriko. 

She moved around the workers after she observed them. There was little chatter and their movements were mechanical and stiff. Using Chaos Sight didn’t reveal much as their clothes were in the way. The coveralls somewhat blocked Chaos Sight too. She couldn’t really observe Elemental energies, being so attuned to Chaos that even the slightest presence overwhelmed everything else. Eavesdropping didn’t really give her much information on where these workers came from, though the speech felt familiar. It was a variant of Wojan and while it had traces of the Myriad Planes variant, there was much to it that was unfamiliar. Listening for a bit longer should help her decipher the changes, but from the little she could already understand, the workers were just complaining about the heat and dryness. 

Shrugging to herself, Desire moved past them and went further down the road. She hoped it would lead to an exit to the material and while she could pierce the Veil anywhere, she was just as likely to end up in a place far away from her master as the opposite. That and she’d use up a lot of her reserves. She was now a Chaos Viscount, but the thinness of the ambient Chaos meant that regenerating lost resources would be painfully slow. If she was with Yuriko, she’d just mooch off her master’s excess, but since she wasn’t, and she was far from the Chaos Sea by now, she had to be frugal. Besides, just walking around with an invisibility veil didn’t consume much power. 

Farther down the road she went. Visibility was still restricted, but not by mists this time. Instead, it was a dust cloud and if she was mortal, Desire might have suffocated from just breathing in the dust and sand. The dust cloud worsened the farther she walked from the road, and a foreboding feeling slowly crept up her heart. The land itself stirred, as though poised to take life, or to unleash a plethora of monsters on the foolish. Desire wondered if killing whatever the strange Fysalli coughed up would be worth the Chaos expenditure. 

Still, fights would draw unnecessary attention, and it occurred to her that her silhouette would be revealed even by just walking across the cloud. She walked back towards the road and found a good balance between visibility and security, which was roughly twenty paces from the road’s center. The road was about ten paces or so wide, but she saw other workers digging foundations to widen it. In fact, another half longstride away, the road was widened to almost twenty paces. 

And not far from that point, she saw an encampment. The closer she got, the more was revealed to her sight. It wasn’t just a bivouac, but a fortified position. It was just that the fortified zone had been engulfed by temporary camps. Tents were set up in neat rows and formed squares and clearings where men and women, soldiers, drilled and trained. Another part of the camp had metallic vehicles parked. Well, they were armoured vehicles rather than just transports, and some had gun and cannons protruding out of the chassis. 

“Tanks?” Desire muttered as she searched her memories. The things looked more than familiar, but not identical to what she saw in the past. There was only one place like that… well, two if she considered the Siderious which had armoured vehicles. Those didn’t look like these ones though, so she was more inclined to think they were from the other region, Irvalla. The tanks looked bigger and a bit more sophisticated though, with a lot of other devices and stuff sticking out of the turret. 

She watched as a convoy of haulers carrying stone, sand, and gravel, trundled out of the camp and headed down the road towards the repair and road-building crew. She contemplated following them, though it wouldn’t really accomplish anything. Then again, what was an army from Irvalla doing here? Was Irvalla close to Bresia? No, Yuriko went to the Eternal Tower…

Desire frowned. Either way, she needed to find out what was going on. Only when she had more information could she act with relative ease. Hmmm. Well, interrogating soldiers wasn’t an easy thing to do, and doing it without being discovered was harder still. 

However, she was a Chaos Viscount, and she didn’t sense anything or anyone around her that could even remotely match her in might. She slowly approached the edge of the camp. She would observe the soldiers’ routines, and would wait until it was their rest cycle. She’d travelled for years, what was a few more hours’ wait?

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