>>6110976>>6111238>>6110774You pack up. You take care. You whisper a few prayers, sprinkle sprays of water. A large ward - modified grounding, too large really to be effective - is scribbled in the sand. It's the ritual of the thing, the careful observation of rote and duty. The world feels . . . more cohesive. The tension in the back of your skulls alleviate. Though also, simple distance will do that. Pack up and move, slow and sure. On the wind, noise drifts. Distorted. Screams? No. Just. .. . noise. Out here in the Leviathan Sea, the endless dunes do stretch on and at times it can be hard to know where sound comes from. Something gets warped on the way. What you hear close is happening far. Things you think are so different that they have no influence on your life inevitable turn out to matter far too close to where you are.
As Caedo, Luz and Icarus grounds everything proper and packs up the water barrels, some of the troopers groan and complain under the weight of the supply wagons. But that's a company for you. It moves at the speed of logistics. Luckily, you have people to handle all that and the packaging goes . . .
>+3Without issue.
--
Phridon spends time elsewise, checking notes and referencing the few scant books in his pack. Blackstones. Blackstones. Blacked Stones? No, he's not interested in Reikan tourist traps or Uthani homecraft jewellery traditions. Blackstones.
They're uncommon - extraordinarily rare - Wrackstones and out of all the various types in their innumerable oddity that the Wastes spit outs, Blackstones have the distinction that they are above all else inert, dull, deadening things. So many Wrackstones are monuments to the excess of bad ideas. They want to be used. The Wastewalkers who acquire them and thrive with them grow to depend on them. Need them. Yearn to ply their talents as the Wrack holds their souls and humanity slips further past the threshold.
But Blackstones don't quite exert such a pull. Hold it to a fire and the fire lessens. Hold it to a river and the river gurgles and you can spot small bubbles as the water flows elsewhere (though the river persists). For a thing that absorbs so much without end it is a wonder it can be held in the human hand at all. Though this is a comforting lie. Blackstones are not so rare. The ones that don't kill you are.
( Phridon pauses here to recall an old lesson: If you see blackened sand on the wind - RUN )
But Icarus' one seem pristine and tuned right so that it does not absorb his life as well as all else. So, so far, so good. A slice of something that takes in other stuff at prodigious rate.
There are Free College experiments to determine how much, what boundary, what weight, but it varies per Blackstone and not any two are truly alike. Some take in more, some release less and many, as mentioned, cannot even be safely handled because whatever structure defines what they can readily devour is not tuned such that it filters out human life.
