Summer the 12th, 520 AV
Timidly, Adeliz watched the people combing Treasure Point’s sands for any signs of its namesake. Thus far, only one of them, a child who had come in with a group of tourists, had found a trinket and was excitedly showing off her find to her father who was only half-watching her while half-watching the jungle edge hesitantly, certain that something was watching them from it. Adeliz could tell the man had never been in the wild before and was only comfortable in the safety of city walls. Adeliz didn’t know what the trinket was. She couldn’t see it from where she watched from jungle’s edge, giving some credibility to the father’s worries. All she knew was she wanted it and only because the girl was so excited to have it. As much as she wanted it though, Adeliz refused to vacate the safety of the jungle to discover what it may be.
That was when the storm sprang up. It came out of nowhere, as such things did. It meant nothing to Adeliz as she had nobody and as such she had nothing to fear. While others scattered and ran for shelter, Adeliz came alive. She watched the girl race toward her father who picked her up and ran down the beach toward the settlement. As they ran, Adeliz saw the trinket drop from her hands to the sand, and though she cried for her father to stop, he kept running for shelter. In moments, Adeliz was alone.
These were the moments she lived for. She was a timid creature, prone to overthinking what others thought of her, but when she was alone, she was a different being entirely. With no one to witness her, there was no need to be shy.
The rain was inconsequential; the wind, meaningless. Even flashes of lightning out on the distant horizon couldn’t frighten her. Everything about it was known, and once a thing was known, it lost the need to be feared. Sure, a storm was dangerous, but not so much for a being that had already died. It could touch her but only if she materialized, and even then, what it could do was unlikely to cause serious harm.
So while others sheltered from the storm, Adeliz braved it, as much as she could be brace. She faced it head on, but only because she knew there was little possibility of injury.
By the time the beach had cleared and Adeliz had made her way on to it, the rain had skipped rapidly over coming down in sheets and was no walls of rain driven by the fiercest gusts of wind Adeliz had ever encountered, though only harsh to the world around her.
A spark of something very un-Adeliz-like arose in her. Defiance. She wanted to spit in the face of the storm, but the storm was Zulrav’s and that meant she’d be spitting in the face of a God. Still, she considered the worst that could happen, realized she was already dead, and decided to go forward with it.
The idea wasn’t so much one of disrespect as it was just her wanting to flex what little muscles she had, test their limits. Unmaterialized, she surged forward into the onslaught of the wind, boundaryless soul meeting walls of rain, and as she did, Adeliz gathered her mists to herself.
In an act that felt colossal to her soul, Adeliz siphoned those mists forward, projecting them into the front of her body to create a single surface with which to push back against the rain. A gust drove another wall of rain her way, and before it could reach her, she shoved her gathered mists forward. It didn’t matter how colossal her efforts felt. She was inconsequential. It meant nothing.
Nothing changed.
The wind gusted, and the rain blew straight through her, unimpeded by her efforts.
Nothing changed.
The blustering, raging wind could do nothing to change her, but it had. It had enraged her. How dare it do nothing? Her soul sparked and cracked, and like lightning, her rage let loose. Mist gathered in the core of her, in the depths of what would have been her guts, where she had always felt was the well of emotion, and in a fit, it lashed forward.
This time, the wind dashed itself on her mist as the two hurled themselves at each other, and a misty spray went up, like that of a wave striking a rocky shore.
A smile rippled through Adeliz’ soul, though nothing showed as she remained unmaterialized.
Something had changed, and she had been the one to make it so. Again and again and again, she tried, but each repetition became a little less potent, and after bells of raging, both the storm and Adeliz petered out. Her soulmist was nearly depleted, and she needed time to recuperate.
Slowly, she became aware of the changes that had occurred in the beach around her. The shoreline had changed and bits of the cliff had eroded away. Her first instinct was to go to where the girl had dropped her trinket, but as Adeliz looked around, she couldn’t identify which part of the beach that had been. She tried for several more moments to get her bearings but began to notice oddities that had either been washed up or uncovered by the storm. They were stone chunks of statues, but there was something different about them. They seemed burdened with power.
Curiosity burned hot in her soul, and the young, dead Akalak drifted toward the nearest one. The image carved into stone was a familiar one from the memories she had shared with Ines. It was a predator, a big cat, on its hindlimbs, rearing to leap and strike down its prey. Adeliz was about to reach out and touch it when something massive blocked out the sun.
Crom trumpeted and swung her head and tusks back and forth, trying to back a barely materialized Adeliz away from the odd stone thing. Adeliz had always liked Crom; and Crom, Adeliz, but this gesture seemed far from friendly or protective. It was threatening. Adeliz backed away and watched another of the Ashta lumber across to the piece and pick it up before turning back to the jungle and trundling away with it. More animals were flocking into the area, all of them picking up pieces and taking them back toward the jungle. Adeliz eyed the chimps carefully as they came and went. She had never trusted apes and monkeys. There was something sketchy about them.
And even as she watched the myriad of animals arrive and vacate the beach, she noticed someone else watching too. A part of her panicked that she may have been watched while she fought the storm, and as the person turned and began to run back to the Commons, Adeliz followed. She didn’t want the other woman to report what the ghost had been doing. She didn’t want to have everyone knowing about the crazed meanderings of her ghostly self.
But the woman beat Adeliz to the shelter before the ghost could stop her and try to reason her into not revealing her secret. The words out of the woman’s mouth though were about the statues and the animals, and Adeliz realized her presence had gone unnoticed. A brief discussion ensued, and from the little Common she could catch, Adeliz surmised that these stone pieces were of some importance and that the animals were likely serving Kihala’s wishes. There was one overall point that she gathered from everything said.
It would benefit the entire settlement if these pieces were found and put together.
Ghosts could travel faster than any person. In a moment, Adeliz was blinking back through the jungle toward Treasure Point. Perhaps she could follow some of the animals if she got there quickly enough. If she knew where the animals took the statues, then she could lead someone there to carry it back.
Once again, Adeliz found herself on Treasure Point’s beach, alone and content to be that way. Ines had tried several times to get her to notice tracks and trails, but Adeliz hadn’t found that she had a knack for it. Still, she tried to make sense of the many animal tracks that covered the beach in the short time since it had been wiped clean. Thinking she saw a trail, Adeliz began to follow it, all the while keeping her eyes open for the trinket the girl had dropped. She was nearly to the jungle’s edge when she heard rustling in the foliage. Dropping herself as much out of existence as she could, Adeliz crept forward, an inaudible, invisible, untouchable thing waiting to witness what she hoped was animals hiding a statue’s piece.
