...is it bad that he thinks this looks really cool? Whatever, if it's bad it's bad.

With the magic hitting him like that, he can start practising Taimi's new spell. If he does something like so it seems like he can... create a bubble of sorts? Around himself? It's very fragile, it looks like it might burst with a stiff look, but it can redirect the ambient magic away from him, at least.

Anyway, the coliseum is the obvious place to go, then. He puts on his glider, activates it, and jumps off the edge of the floating island. He's sure he'll be able to find some air currents, or magical currents, that'll take him there; the magic is everywhere here.

He can definitely find some air and/or magical currents! There are more than enough available. This is unfortunate, because there is a such thing as 'too much current,' and this place has blown past that and straight into being an unstable whirling maelstrom. He is the equivalent of a tiny fluff of dandelion, leaping into a windstorm. He does not have the kind of control to get anywhere he means to go, and the only speed available on this ride is very extremely fast.

He's ripped through the sky with the floating debris still held aloft, all of them together circling the area like a drain. Coliseum? He's not getting there anytime soon. Just landing on something at all is probably pushing it, and getting down is just not going to happen, at least not how he's conducting himself currently.

(Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee~)

Okay, okay, he has an actual mission here. This is... okay, he doesn't know if it is actually possible to navigate, it may not be, but he doesn't know that it's impossible, yet. What he does know is that for him to be able to navigate it, he's going to need to do some thinking on his feet.

Can he just... close the wings of his glider and drop directly down?

That... helps him go in a more downwards direction, yes. It is not, to be clear, directly down - even with the way the magic flows around his shielding because of Taimi's rune, there's enough to catch and keep him up. But it is more down than over, which is arguably progress. This progress does come at some cost; there's a lot of debris that he's lost the ability to steer around, and it's now faster than him and moving at a different angle. He will get introduced to some of the landscape rather personally.

He might notice, while getting pelted with the aforementioned debris, that blood red crystals have begun forming on bits of earth and rock and miscellaneous pulped jungle bits.

...huh. That's concerning. Blood red crystals sounds like, well, Bloodstone bullshit.

But, well, he thinks this is doable. Quickly switching between gliding and not is something he already knows how to do, and his glider doesn't need to actually use magical currents—that was in fact a skill he had to learn separately! So that's three modes of flight: no glider, glider on, glider on plus magical current gliding. And, hmm...

...is there a way for him to reverse his magical current gliding? Or, like, not reverse, exactly, but if gliding through magic is a skill that involves actively making himself and his glider more magically resistant, can he... sort of... reduce his magical area of attack, so to speak? It's not intuitive how, but it sounds like something he might want to try to figure out, if it's possible.

He can, yes, and it even feels straightforward when combining what he already knows about magical resistance with Taimi's rune as a model to work from. Straightforward is not the same thing as easy, but it's certainly doable, and he has a lot of practice dealing with strange magical phenomena.

Smoothing out his magical shielding helps him move regardless of the current, but doesn't quite get him all the way to flying against it. It does help him feel a bit less like a windblown leaf, which may or may not be an improvement, considering how much fun he was having earlier. Maybe if he arranged his smooth shielding into a channel, redirecting the energy in the opposite direction, he could properly fly into the magical currents? That seems possible, if much, much harder.

That's when the other device Taimi snuck onto his person begins crackling.

"- magical repository of some kind? Unclear how old it is from current observations, but -"

"...what was that, Taimi?" Although that didn't sound like Taimi.

For a little while, there's just more static, then as he circles closer to this bit of uprooted tree -

"- not particularly impressed with this - what even is it, some kind of cult? - they seem to have all the combined brain power of a particularly dim ooze -"

Okay, that was definitely not Taimi, even though the biting sense of humour is not dissimilar.

Well, he'll... actually how much progress is he making on the trying to get to the coliseum front, should he abort that and just try to get to solid ground instead?

He's making some progress on getting closer to the coliseum, but that also might be the way the ambient magic is settling down a bit. Or, well, crystalizing into a bloodstone form, which may or may not be an improvement.

Getting to the ground certainly seems more straightforward, though.

Yeah, okay, ground it is. He'll try the coliseum later.

The good news is that there is in fact a ground down there.

The bad news is that it's filled with bloodstone crazed monsters, some of which happened to once be people. Fortunately, most of them seem to have been White Mantle.

...most of them?

Ah.

Fuck.

When Canach woke up this morning, he did have the thought that maybe it was not a good day to go out and be a person. He ignored that thought, because he has thoughts like that more days than not, and besides his Hunt started nagging him, but maybe he should adopt a policy of listening to those thoughts more often. Who cares about the Wyld Hunt anyway? He managed to ignore the voice of the literal Mind Dragon for as long as it existed, the Hunt barely registers compared to that old guy.

And you know what the advantage of that plan would've been? People who are not Valiants of the Wyld Hunt do not get caught in bizarre explosions that looked like they were about to wipe out half the continent until they decided that nah actually and reversed back into themselves, dragging the airships that happened to be on their way towards the source of said explosions down with them. The sylvari in the Grove did not have to deal with that today. Most sylvari in the world did not have to deal with that today. Really, almost no one had to deal with that today, relatively speaking. And one fewer person would've had to deal with that today, had that person done the wise thing and ignored their damned Wyld Hunt and stayed in bed.

Canach's airship, and the other Shining Blade ships, were relatively lucky. He saw a couple of ships get actually caught in the blast, and he holds no illusions about the fate of the poor souls in them. He also saw a couple of ships that were almost caught, much closer than his was, and the fates of those are... much more uncertain.

"We have two priorities here," he tells his squad, once they're on solid ground and all healed or most of the way to it. "Priority number one is finding Minister Caudecus, and priority number two is ascertaining the extent of the damage suffered by our allies. In particular, the General of the Vigil and the Commander of the Pact are high-priority targets.

"We will split up into seven teams, one of which will stay here to lend support to the other six, which will spread out. Each team will have a runner whose main job will be returning here to camp once every hour to get updated on the other teams. Whoever finds the Minister should stay on his trail, and their runner should come find me immediately; likewise for the Pact Commander. We rendez-vous back here at nightfall, in case we fail. Understood?"

"Yes, sir!" they say in unison.

"If there are any questions or concerns, voice them now. As soon as we are all fit to go, we will go."

Most sylvari don't have to deal with any of this.

Canach wishes very often that he were most sylvari.

Most sylvari also couldn't provide Canach's level of shielding against the current environmental conditions, which on the whole is probably an improvement for this mission's success. Whether this is comfort enough to make up for how much the job of being barrier guardian sucks, is up to Canach himself. Holding back the fizzling soup that wants to rip them apart has all of the glamour of latrine duty. His squad is, at least, able to handle the slog at a faster pace than the others.

The magical anomalies they encounter are not, individually, hard to put down. Instead, the problem is that there's a lot of them - little motes of hostile energy that has figured out how to be alive, how to eat other things to grow, and little else - and they reform when left to their own devices. They're drawn to the stability of the squad's barrier, wishing to steal some of it for themselves, as much as such primitive creatures can want anything at all.

But this also means that they're drawn to other sources of stability, too. They could, in theory, do a lot of the footwork for him. Would Canach like to follow them to see what else they're hunting?

No.

...he's gonna but he would all in all just rather not.

To compare them to hunting hounds would be doing a disservice to proper hounds, but, well. They do lead him and his squad to... something that seems like it used to be someone. He's dressed in what were once White Mantle robes, and there are great shards of crimson crystal growing out of him. The little anomalies fling themselves into him almost gleefully, and he seems to - welcome them. The crystals lodged inside him grow longer, and seem to gleam brighter.

"Yessss, yes," says the thing that is probably not a person anymore, "more, more, crystals, yes, power....!"

Suffice to say, this member of the White Mantle is not really up for answering questions.

But Canach will not be the one to initiate hostilities.

"Excuse me!" he calls to the person.

"POWER!!!" he replies, and then he tries to kill them.

At least he tried to talk to him (it??) first?

Yes, for all the good that did. The Bloodstone-crazed White Mantle cultist gets dispatched without effort.

Onwards.

There are a few more like this, only notable in having different hyper-fixations in their magic induced madness. One is collecting the bloodstone shards that are growing off of the foliage, and another is... cleaning??? That one was plausibly more capable of holding a conversation than the others, but unfortunately considered Canach and his squad to be vermin to be eliminated, so. The same in the end, if a little bizarre.

The next edible thing the anomalies lead him to is different, though. A twist in the air, notable by the purple hue and the way it doesn't waver like its surroundings; a beacon of magical stability, in this tumultuous time.