Completed Moonglow I

[Tazrae]

Timestamp: 5th of Fall, 522 A.V.

Tazrae moved along the jungle, barefoot, her hair loose and bouncing around her shoulders. She had on almost nothing, which was strange for her since she usually traveled in a full set of her jungle gear. She could feel the damp mud of the wet soil and vegetation sink down with each footstep, sometimes brown water bubbling up from the clay squishing between her toes. Leaf litter with its fresh green slightly decaying scent drifted up at her with each footfall.

It was dark, yet she had no trouble seeing which was something else off about where she found herself. Taz couldn’t remember heading into the jungle, let alone after sundown. This was her normal time to roam the jungle, but she couldn’t remember a conscious decision to do so. The young mage would have guessed she was dreaming, but there was a too-real quality about the world around her to even have her suspect she was dreaming. But she could feel the need in her building, to follow, to find, to be in this world at this moment. It was the most unusual sensation.

Occasionally, above her, there were fleeting glimpses of stars where one of the forest giants had fell revealing the sky. It made the going treacherous below, but the jungle around the canopy opening always bloomed, thriving with the additional light. Everything was green and vibrant, with life everywhere. At night the insects and frogs sang, calling out to each other with weird cries that ranged in almost every octave and every tone. Taz loved the jungle sounds at night. It soothed her somehow, to be so surrounded, reminded that she wasn’t truly ever alone in the world here.

The Innkeeper had some strange habits for sure. Being a hostess, cook, and indeed ranger in Syka required odd hours. Despite the varied schedule, Tazrae managed to find time to herself. She napped the afternoons away at Garden Beach after a hard morning’s work, and was at the Inn again for the evening doings. She roamed after dinner, taking her rest only in the very early morning hours. Tazrae woke well before the dawn, baking and cooking for her guests. She stayed through lunch, often, and then returned in the evenings for dinner preparation and serving. Rooms were cleaned after the guests were out and about for their day, and laundry was done as needed. Her free time was stolen in the afternoons to nap and in the early evenings to roam. And in the here and now, out in the jungle, it felt a lot like early evening, just after dark.

Taz wandered on, unsure of what she was doing, almost as if she were an observer in her own life. She scanned the area thoroughly, tracking softly, looking for signs of animal passage or trails animals frequented. But she wasn’t hunting. Tazrae knew enough to know that. She wasn’t foraging for food or out taking advantage of free meat when she came across something in the jungle that she was well able to kill. But this wasn’t one of those situations. Her attention wasn’t divided over what needed to be done and what she was doing. Instead, she was wholly focused on the task at hand; finding the light.

Then, it appeared again.

There was a glowing white light above her, higher in the trees… moving away, just out of her reach. She lifted her hands, cupping them, as if the glow that so resembled Leth was a giant firefly one she could catch in her cage of fingers. But she was moving too slowly, painfully so, to ever catch the elusive light. So Tazrae stopped… frustrated. Reaching down, she freed her breasts from the bandana that wrapped around her torso and slipped off the loose short skirt that covered her to her midcalf. That was all she was wearing. Sweet Refrain wasn’t even at her side. It was … unsettling.

[Tazrae]

Tazrae tossed the garments aside, impatiently, and ran her hand across the Ixam scale embedded in her chest. The scale unfolded, multiplied, and spread out across her body. The shift came swiftly and painlessly. She traded two legs for four and skin for scales. And soon enough her neck and jaw elongated and her tailbone grew to a true tail. A young jungle Ixam, black as the night around her, shimmered with iridescence in the place the woman had stood.

Turquoise eyes now far larger than before looked around, drinking in subtle detail even in the darkness of night. She registered heat and cold as her tongue flicked in and out of her toothy maw, tasting the atmosphere and looking for an elusive scent. It was there, only higher, and so she traveled up leaving her clothes and her humanity behind. She finally came out on a level of the jungle she’d never paid much attention to before. It was the same level that high-flying birds and birds of prey preferred. The level had its draw to such things because of its height and the ease with which large winged creatures could travel in and out of the canopy, freeing themselves to open air. She stood perched on a thick limb of a tree, front paw curled up in a stretch, tail lashing, drinking in the taste of the air around her.

She ranged outward, looking for the light. Tazrae had seen it before, dimmed and broken, but she couldn’t quite remember where. She started to climb again, only this time she didn’t move vertically but horizontally. There were thousands of trails across limbs and vines and leaping great gaps at this level of the jungle. She could navigate it with ease, having four legs, claws and the litheness of a lizard.

Taz, now equipped to better do so, took to the nearest tree pathway and scurried up, down, and leaped across, confident in her motions, claws digging into the bark and easily navigating the vertical and horizontal structures. She swung her head right to left, searching, seeing nothing. It was as if she’d been witnessing the glow from Leth and he’d conveniently ducked behind the nearest cloud.

She called out, mournfully, in her Ixam voice. In the distance, other Ixam answered, echoing her query back at her along with invitations to join them. She was young, strong, healthy, and female. There was an open invitation for her to join most lounges outstanding anywhere in Falyndar. The Jungle Ixam owned the trees here, this being their hunting ground and where they thrived despite the dangers.

But she already had a lounge, one that took its ease on the beach lead by a monstrous scarlet Ixam. He’d have not let her leave the beach in this form, though he cared not where she went with two legs. In her four-legged form, he was disapproving of her eggless status and sought to fill her belly with them if she’d let him. Though it was to his constant frustration and puzzlement that she never went into season and demanded his attention as the other females did. The other females swelled with eggs enough for the entire settlement and hid them around the area, leaving the hatchlings to fend for themselves when their leathery shells baked enough to give them a true chance at life.

[Tazrae]

Tazrae saw enough of the doings of the Ixam to know she wanted no part of it. She was too human to allow for a beautiful powerful male cover her, nor did she think a pregnancy would survive such shifting. That didn’t mean she was unaffected. Sometimes the scarlet male smelled so incredibly good her entire body burned. And when he danced before her Ixam eyes, with chest bobs and tail flicks to entice her, it drove a heat through her that was intense.

But she was human enough, beneath the scales, to know the sign for what it was… a trick of Caihya’s to ensure copulation and reproduction. Taz had seen the big male service other females that had fallen for his amorous attention, letting him mount them and fill them with seed causing her to know what was going on with her own body and steer well clear.

If she wanted children, she’d have them the old-fashioned way… with another human or humanoid.

Taz moved then, scenting the air with her tongue and her nose. There it was again… that elusive scent she knew she’d smelled before. It smelled of fresh salt air, a kind of exotic textured scent that reminded her of feathers, and …. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. The scent was incredibly familiar. It was one she’d smelled before, only that time it had been laced with blood and pain, and the acrid scent of poison.

Despair had a flavor too.

That scent had been heavy in the air as she’d snuck into an encampment too big for her to take on alone. She’d done what she could, in that distant horrible jungle place. She’d cut the bindings on the bamboo cages that had housed exotic animals that had been captured and caged to either be transported back to the eastlands of Sylira or the be killed. It had been her experience that places like Cyphrus, Eyktol and Sylira all loved staring at the strange and exotic, even if the strange and exotic didn’t like being stared at. And that was the best-case scenario. Slavery was no better than the death that would come to most of these creatures either on the trip or deliberately due to the requirements of their body parts for spell components or maledictions.

No thank you. She let the other calls of hopeful suitors go unanswered. She didn’t want nocturnal dalliances this night. Nor did she want the big scarlet to come out from Garden Beach, hearing her call and ready to defend her as his. Ixam males fought, and it could be violet at times. That wasn’t what she wanted. Instead, she wanted to find the light.

Glancing around, she sniffed, clambered higher and then lower before she caught it again and resumed the chase. There was no glow to lead her way, but she had a fresh scent while it lasted. The Ixam made the jumps from branch to branch, heading north, deeper into the jungle.

[Tazrae]

When she thought she lost the trail, often she’d pause, settle on her haunches, and wait. Sooner or later, time was meaningless to Ixam really, she’d catch a glimpse of what she swore was Leth’s own light and dart after it, once more on the trail. The light comprised of not only a visual aspect but an auditory aspect. It was laughter… deep and masculine, so Tazrae tipped her head, tilted her chin, and listened with Audius, letting her hearing take the lead.

The sound was predatory, like the cry of a hunting bird or flying lizard, and yet lighthearted as if the creature enjoyed the elusive game. Taz wasn’t certain the two were completely unrelated… lizard and bird. But then she heard it. The tell-tale sound of feathers and knew it for what it was. It was avian. Bird. Something large. She tried remembering if she’d ever heard the sound of those particular wings, and couldn’t think she had. Parrots? Yes… big birds like tucans and cranes? Sure. But this… this was something altogether different.

Taz followed, listening, watching for the light. There was no actual trail-sigh tracking involved, no way to follow footprints and broken vegetation from something that flew without touching anything. She did spot a place or two where there appeared to be marked from talons on branches that were as big as her legs. She found several, sniffed them thoroughly, and could picture something big taking off and landing. Why was it so elusive? Tazrae climbed up, across, down, leaped from tree to tree, worked her way down, and roamed, following

The Innkeeper in her Ixam form followed, giving chase, and finding nothing. The glow was elusive and yet at the same time pervasive. The jungle was so surreal, accepting, and yet this felt like a dream… an utter dream. Her protective jewelry rattled on her body and the armband that circled her human arm rode like a bracelet tangled with her charms on her reptilian wrist.

The jewelry gave her information, about where snakes were, causing her to be constantly plotting out routes for her to avoid them as she traveled. It was because of that fact she knew she wasn’t snake bitten and knew she was awake. If the chase was a dream… a dream wouldn’t have functional magic would it?

[Tazrae]

Tazrae chased the creature through the jungle for bells… until she was exhausted and almost lost. It was then, and only then, that she turned back having wandered further from Garden Beach and Syka than she’d ever remembered being before. It took her bells to return, stumbling, she almost crawled not into her pavilion and the bed there, but into her palapa and the dirt-friendly materials that awaited her there. She collapsed, asleep almost instantly, trying to catch as much sleep as she could before she had to get up and tend the Inn.

It wasn’t until the sun rose that Tazrae woke, still exhausted and footsore. She started to stand, to stretch, dumping several of the juvenile Ixam that were cuddled up to her onto the thick sleeping pad without her. She rubbed crust out of her eyes, gave herself a distasteful sniff at how ripe she was and stared down at her muddy bare feet. Something glimmering caught her eye and she turned, finding a pinion feather nearly as long as her full arm resting across the pillows above where her head made an indent. It was of purest white, beautiful, and in the weak light of the newly risen sun… it appeared to glow.

Taz reached out carefully, took it into her hands, and studied it. She’d never seen a feather more lovely, not in all her days nor in all the days she’d lived in Syka with all its colorful birds. She’d even seen flamingos with their bright pink feathers and couldn’t compare the beauty of this one with those. She was no expert, having had no contact with any birds but those that came to her feeders at The Protea.

She thought, though, it could not belong to anything but a raptor, and a big one at that. Tazrae took the feather, cradled it to her, and ran her fingers down its length, zipping some of the misplaced veins back together. It did glow, she realized, as it illuminated her caramel skin before the sun came up and stole its subtle mystical quality away. Tazrae turned in a circle, beneath the awning of the palapa, and scanned the area for anything white or for any sign of her visitor from the night.

There was nothing, no footprints nor sounds of deep laughter in the trees. She turned another circle, just to be sure, then sang a pure note out, sending out her ultrasound, wanting feedback and the waves of tone to paint her a picture only she with her gnosis mark of Rhaus could see. She saw life everywhere hidden in the trees… and more outward life such as the Ixam playing in the surf down at the water. But there was nothing different… nothing that didn’t belong. It was almost spooky… if not for the huge feather in her hand, she’d have sworn she’d dreamed the whole thing.

Running out of time, she turned again, still finding nothing, but tipping her head back anyhow. “Thank you… for the feather.” She said, then augmented what she said. “And the search. It was fun.” She declared, deciding that no matter how exhausted she was, it had been fun… even though she’d been tracking something so elusive all she could follow was its laughter.

Word Count: 2656