"Did you see that? Phlunt was so mad, even his fleas jumped ship," says an asura even tinier than asura usually are (on account of being 16 and also having a congenital degenerative disease). "Canach, you're my hero."

"Why the surprise visit?" asks the Commander, not bothering to hide his delight in seeing Canach.

"The Hunt."

James folds his arms and waits.

Canach sighs. "I'm looking for you, Commander."

"...your Hunt directed you specifically to me?"

"Hey, if there's anyone we know who might be Hunted..."

"Yes, yes, terribly hilarious," Canach drawls dryly. "Minister Caudecus has recently, ah, 'left' the queen's protective custody. And the Hunt was even more insistent than usual that I should help with that. So Anise sent me and a squad of Shining Blade to escort him back to Divinity's Reach."

"And you sought out my help? Canach, I'm flattered."

"Well, who else do I know that loves to bring death and destruction to his enemies as much as you do, Commander?"

"Is Minister Caudecus my enemy, now?"

"Oh, yes."

"Did the Hunt tell you that?"

"My brain told me that, Commander."

"Will your brain care to enlighten us folks who don't have direct access to it?"

"Yes, on the way to northern Maguuma, which is where our intel points to him heading, as well as a flare-up of White Mantle activity, if you'd believe the coincidence."

"Wait, is that the crazy magical hotspot we saw on the leyline map earlier? By the Bloodstone?"

"Why, yes, that is where the Bloodstone is, isn't it, what an even bigger coincidence."

"Didn't the minister claim to not be in bed with those mursaat lovers?"

"Rytlock! I almost didn't see you there, you're so quiet. Ah, wait, I think I might be confusing my sight with my hearing again, my bad, you're the blind one."

"Careful, cactus. Sylvari burn just as easily as weeds," the charr says with a low growl, placing his left paw on the hilt of his magic sword, which is not currently on fire but could very quickly be.

"I'm shaking in my boots," Canach drawls. "Yes, Brimstone, Minister Caudecus did claim to not be White Mantle. As with most things politicians say, you should always be aware that it might not be true. Not that I could ever guess why someone might claim to not be involved with White Mantle, especially in Kryta of all places, but it takes all sorts to do politics."

He growls some more.

"As much as I love watching you two fight, this seems important," says James. "Rytlock, get word to the others. Marjory might be getting a little restless in Divinity's Reach and want in on the action."

"Commander, if you'd like, you can hitch a ride on my airship," says another charr that's been quiet throughout this conversation. "It's on our way; we can drop you off."

"That would be much appreciated, General, thank you."

"Perfect. I'll grab my Shining Blade detachment and meet you there."

"Commander's destination ahead! Looks like we're in for quite a ride," says one of the General's crewmembers.

    "...we're not flying into that scramble, are we?"

"By gods, grow a backbone! Scared of a little weather?"

James seems to now have a broken leg.

How did that... happen.

He's had his legs broken before. He has in fact kind of lost count of how many times he's broken things. He can recognise the pain. But usually he knows what caused it. Now, he...

He remembers light, and sound. Actually, wait, sound, he can't hear anything right now except for a very loud ringing. Did he go deaf? What happened? They were flying towards that admittedly terrifying storm cloud, and the red lightning emanating from the brilliant shining red spot where presumably the bloodstone was was perhaps a warning that they should've turned back and tried to approach more cautiously, but whatever happened happened really fast.

Where... is he?

When he opens his eyes, he will notice that it's not just the ringing in his ears that's blocking his senses. There's a white film covering everything he sees, which he can't blink away.

But he's not completely blind. He's in what's recognisably the wreckage of General Soulkeeper's airship, and they're grounded, but it's really hard to make out what's outside, on account of the dusty red fog that seems to be surrounding the ship.

Light, and sound. Was there... an explosion? Did the Bloodstone explode? But if a Bloodstone exploded he would not have expected to survive that. He'd have expected to be pulverised, honestly.

Alright, he needs to get oriented. Lying on the floor with a broken leg is a great way to not stay alive for much longer, so he needs to be up and to find a healer. A better one than him, that is; what little healing he does know cannot deal with the extent of the damage he's suffered, not when he's probably been unconscious for several minutes, now.

The ship should have one. Are they alive? Is anyone else?

Actually there do not seem to be any corpses in sight! Everyone seems to either be awake, getting that way, or groaning in pain. If the Bloodstone exploded, it was a very localised explosion that barely touched the airship beyond grounding it. It probably didn't even properly crash, James has experience with actual airship crashes from that kind of height and it looks a lot less pretty than this.

The healer is over there, currently taking care of General Soulkeeper.

Excellent. Now, how broken is his leg, can he put any weight on it...

Nope he definitely cannot, okay!

He'll limp, then. It's been about ten seconds since he came to and that is far too many seconds of disorientation, in his opinion. He pulls himself up, ignoring the pain from everywhere else in his body. There might be other broken bones, but none of them are as obvious as his leg, which now that he looks is really not great, yikes.

But he needs to be up. He needs to figure out what's happening.

"General?" he calls, once he's successfully limped close enough that he doesn't have to shout. He can't hear his own voice, but hopefully she can.

She looks up at him and says something, but he can't make it out.

He points at his ears and shakes his head at the same time as he says, "I can't hear anything right now."

She looks at the healer and says something to them.

They stop healing her and turn their attention to James.

For a wound that's several minutes old like this, it's not immediate, but he does little by little recover his sense of hearing.

"This is much better, thank you!"

"General, what happened?"

"I think the Bloodstone... exploded, and then not."

"'And then not'?"

"We're alive, aren't we? Something must've stopped it."

"Commander! Commander, can you read me?" says Taimi's voice, coming from... somewhere behind James.

He looks around, but she is not there. "Taimi? How are you—where are you?"

"I'm in your bag! I put a two way communicator in there when you were in Rata Novus."

"I don't have time for this, something just expl—"

"The leyline map just went crazy, and it's where you were going! Are you there?"

"Yeah. I don't—"

"Okay, magic levels that high could be super hazardous! Like Xs for eyes hazardous!"

Wow, Taimi, extremely useful.

"But I may have a solution! Based on some of Zinn's old Rata Novan research, I've devised a way for you to counter certain types of magical threats."

...okay, that may be useful.

"Oh?"

"It's hard to explain like this. It's in your bag, too, I figured it might be useful. You can probably figure it out, though? Through use, I mean."

"...thanks, Taimi. We'll need to have a conversation about property ownership at some point."

"Oops! Lab fire! Gotta go!"

"...is she... always like that?"

"Uncomfortably often, yes." Okay, what did Taimi put in his bag, other than the two-way communicator?

Seems to be a special rune of some kind, for his armour.

...he really does not want to have to replace his existing runes, but maybe it can't be helped.

"By the Pale Tree, Commander," says the healer. "Your leg! Why didn't you open with that?" They start healing it, too.

"Communication was more important. My vision isn't great, either, while we're at it, though." He forcibly sets his bones back in place, which hurts like a bitch but will hurt a lot less than letting the spell do it for him.

"What are you planning to do?"

"Investigate, of course. Canach was supposed to meet me here, so I need to find him, too. Does the ship have portable waypoints?"

"Yes. I'll have someone get them set up." She starts trying to get up, then groans.

"You, General, are staying put. You're a lot worse off than the Commander."

"I can't send him out without backup—"

"You are not sending me anywhere. To the extent the Pact still exists and I am still in it, I outrank you, and if it doesn't and I'm not, you have no command over me anyway.

"Stay here, make sure everyone is alright. I'm used to flying solo, you don't need to worry."

"Burn my fur, you're impossible, Commander," she says, the tip of her tail twitching from side to side in amusement. "But yes, understood. Watch your back, and let me know what you find out."

"I will."

After James is properly healed, he puts his combat armour on—it has spikes and fire and is very menacing, has a cool psychological effect on his enemies—then applies Taimi's rune to it. Thankfully, it seems that rather than overriding one of his existing runes, it exists alongside them? And it doesn't have an effect on its own; it's almost like a spell insignia on his weapons, but he can tell that it's meant to be training wheels to help him learn how to use the magic Taimi developed.

He won't be able to do it unless he gets properly exposed to some magic, though, so, uh...

...what does the outside look like?

Once James is out of the airship's magical shielding, it hits him like a second blast wave. Magic. Bright, burning, inescapable, leaving a faint red haze over all. It crackles around him, unstable and raw and stinging against his skin, trying to tear at him just for existing in it. Without Taimi's rune, it might knock him entirely over without further shielding. With it, he can sort of move through it; it smooths his personal shielding into something that the unstable energy moves around, instead of slamming into. Even so, the air is so thick with it, it's like moving in a thick soup, with enough substance to metaphorically hold him aloft.

... Or not just metaphorically. There seems to be a problem with the ground being in... pieces. It's literally floating, held up by warring currents of too-much-magic with no place to go. What seemed at first like solid ground is really just a large chunk of flying earth, pinned together by some combination of chance and the magical airship that was in theory built for hostile conditions. Floating in the distance, a large coliseum is similarly intact in the air; it likely has, or perhaps had, similar shielding to help keep it together in the wake of the disaster. Everything else, though? Shards of earth, suspended and spinning almost gently in the bright, shifting hellscape that was once Maguuma Jungle.

If there's still a ground, it's not visible from up here.

...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.

" -ducting this idiotic opert-" says a feminine voice through the... crack? Tear, maybe?

It proves to be a very talkative voice, though, and more informative than any of the White Mantle he's been able to find. Further crackling words are:

"-ver months,"

"demented mining operation,"

"definitely going to explode..."

...

"Hello?"

No direct response. It continues its crackled muttering, regardless of him. However, with proximity (and bringing his shield around the tear to stabilize it a bit), he can make out a bit more of what is being said.

"- crackpot cult with a rock fetish -"

What... is this. This person isn't wrong, but where are they, why can they not hear him? Is this a recording of some kind, a ghost...? Does he have a snarky ghost here somehow?

It's not clear. If there's a ghost present, she's not making herself obviously apparent except for the muttering, and it's not obvious how a recording would have been stored in this medium.

She continues to be a very helpful ghost/recording/magical anomaly, though.

"- ways to mitigate the inevitable disaster? -"

"- even so it'll tear a damn hole to the...."

And then the voice trails off, and falls silent.

...no, all in all he thinks he's left with more questions than answers. He supposes now he knows the cultists were apparently eating Bloodstone shards? Which is an absolutely insane thing to do, but if these people were sane they would not be White Mantle, now, would they? And he can't imagine that was what caused the explosion. 

Note to self, though, Caudecus might have indigestion when they finally find him. Sorry, assuming he's working with the White Mantle, of course, he's innocent until proven otherwise.

But this doesn't actually bring Canach any closer to his goals, so, he should keep going.

Unfortunately for Canach, the following magical anomalies are not nearly so informative. Or sane.

It's going to be a long day.

It's a rather long day.

The ambient Bloodstone magic is harsh on everyone, and James has to take down more than one erstwhile ally who got forcibly overwritten by a mindless beast. He does not like it any better than any of the previous times he has had to do this. He really feels like it's not asking much, to not have to kill someone he's fought beside just because some insane magic took over their brain. On the bright side, most of his people are fine, especially people who were not as close to the blast, and who managed to stay sheltered while the magic anomalies settled down.

Speaking of which, he does eventually manage to figure out a way to navigate the maelstrom and reach the coliseum. It does not have anything of interest, which is disappointing. It does have a view of something of interest, which is mildly terrifying.

Oh, does he mean the gigantic crater in the ground that could fit the coliseum and every remaining airship in the (admittedly deprecated) Pact fleet, at the same time? Covered in glowing and growing crystals and at the center of the magical disaster, now becoming faintly visible through the lightening red fog? Filled with horrible abominations that know nothing except rage and pain and hunger? Does he mean that?

Yeah, that's probably alarming or something.

Compared to the coliseum, it's very easy to get to. The ambient magical radiation is not quite so friendly, though, which is to say it bites twice as hard and hates him personally. Is he sure he wants to investigate it?

No. Not at all. First he is going to go back to the crashed ship and tell the General about it.

"Fire and brimstone, Commander."

"I know."

"Any signs of Canach or the human minister?"

"No, but I imagine the crater will be a natural convergence point for anything of interest. And Squad Leader Bennett mentioned seeing Caithe run past, which, knowing Caithe, means that she wanted to be seen."

"Caithe... The sylvari firstborn? What is she doing here?"

"Don't I wish I knew. The crater is probably our best lead."

"Best of luck, Commander. You'll forgive me for not joining you."

"No, I could not ask this of you, of course. You should make sure our people are safe and bring them home."

"Ah, no, not that, either. I'm afraid the White Mantle have made themselves everyone's problem when they nearly destroyed the continent, so the Pact is probably going to come here en masse to make sure they don't get to try a second time."

"Sensible enough. Thank you, General."

She grunts. "It's my job. Now go do yours."

"Yes, sir."

Okay, now he's gonna go explore that crater. A little break for food and resting his legs goes a long way to give him the energy to keep going.

Hopefully also the energy to deal with the horrifying abominations contained within. Because those feature heavily.

Some are maddened White Mantle, but more common is some kind of bloodstone elemental. Bloodstone shards held together by will and malice and magic.

They are still killable, though, so he's probably fine.

The new spell Taimi developed is really good, at dealing with them, too. Whenever they try to use too much magic at James, he can bounce it right back at them, and they explode. 

...perhaps he should be more careful of the explosions. He's not gonna, but maybe he should.

Taimi's communicator decides to start talking again; this time, it's louder and clearer.

"- this area recently experienced a large flood of magical energy. I'm not sure from what exactly, the fractal doesn't reach that far, but it feels, hm, planty? And very, very large. But whatever it is, it's moved the timetable up for the inevitable cataclysmic explosion this time bomb's hurtling towards. I've been trying to calculate the expected size of the explosion, but the new energy has thrown off all my calculations and the ambient magic those idiots keep stoking has destroyed all of my notes. Again!"

"...this is clearer than it's been before," he says out loud, having acquired the bad habit of speaking to the voice that can't hear him over the course of running into this weird anomaly all day long. "Of course Mordremoth's death would've powered up the Bloodstone. I should check whether Taimi included that in her calculations."

"Regardless, the hypocenter of the inevitable stupid explosion is fairly obvious, even if it was debatable before - they seem to be planning some kind of ritual next to the hole they cracked in the - I guess I don't know for sure it's a Bloodstone, in the really really big magical repository that has every indication, but no outside confirmation, of being a Bloodstone. I don't know why they've decided to go and conduct a ritual down there - I'll need to look through their letters without disturbing the fractal too much, I don't want to reset this again and risk destabilizing it further. It's a terrible plan, though, but what else is new when it comes to this cult."

—wait. Wait. Wait a minute. Fractal?

Ah, fuck.

Okay, he thinks he knows what's happening with this weird voice. He... might need to go talk to Dessa about it. Assuming he's not a fractal, that is, that'd be depressing. Not that he knows how he could tell, and he thinks there isn't much he can do without outside help. 

But, well, it makes sense that there'd be fractals of what happened here in the Mists, it's a very big and magical and historically important event, and it also probably thinned the Veil by a lot.

And maybe that person could still be here. 

He keeps going.

There are, predictably, more things to kill.

And also more from the mysterious voice from the Mists.

"- ritual was definitely under new management. I don't understand - there's obviously more competence to the new guy. But he seems to have decided that it's all going to blow anyway, might as well make it the most spectacular explosion Tyria's ever seen. And that's from a damn Orrian, if anyone knows their spectacular explosions it'd be -"

The voice seems to break a little, then stops.

"... it'll certainly blow a hole to the Mists, at least. I might be able to use this. If it doesn't kill me. If there's a Tyria to even return to after this blast. If - ugh. No, enough, think through the problem..."

Yeah! That's what he was thinking! And if there's anywhere such a hole would be—

—wait, Orrian?

Wait.

Wait.

Wait a gods damned minute.

Oh that's going to be fucking hilarious.

So, the crater is actually more of an enormous hole, and it opens into a cave. If there's anyway for him to find this person...

She'd probably be at the center of where the explosion occurred; there are signs of a torrent of magic coming from that direction.

Predictably, there's a lot of magic at this location.

And one little subtle twist in the air that doesn't feel the same as the rest of the magical cacophony. If he weren't looking for it, or something like it, it would be very easy to miss.

The communicator crackles as James draws close to it, but the voice of the Mists doesn't say anything.

"I don't actually know what to do about this," he says, out loud.

The communicator crackles -

"- hello???"

"Oh, good, that works! Hello!" —wait, he does not want to be intimidating and spiky right now. He pulls his helmet off and withdraws the fire and spikes from his armour. "I'm James, it's nice to meet you! It seems like you might be stuck in the Mists? And if I'm not a fractal, I might be able to help! Somehow! Hopefully you will know how!"

There's a little relieved laugh.

"Hi, James. Nice to meet you too, probably. Technically speaking I'm sort of between the Mists and Tyria, because being fully on the Tyrian side during the explosion would have gotten me vaporized. Uh - you should just need to stabilize your side of the rift and then I should fall through?"

"That seems like something someone who is not me would definitely know how to do."

"Oh, um. Extend your personal shield to cover the little - it's not really a rift, more like a bubble? It's being held together mostly by the pressure of the ambient magic, the plan had been to wait for things to settle down enough that it would burst on its own. But shielding it should probably be enough."

"Understood!" Time to make his experimental shield spell that was developed by a sixteen-year-old supergenius over the past few days interact with this woman's only shot at escaping from a fate worse than death! What could go wrong?

Nothing, apparently!

With a little yelp of surprise, a red haired woman is dropped out of the air, and into his arms.

He was thankfully already expecting to need to stabilise her. "It worked! It's a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance. Welcome back to Tyria."

"... Hi," she says, a little shyly, smiling beautifully. "Um. Thank you. It's, uh, still standing? Not torn apart by too many explosions?"

"It is, somehow, still standing, Bloodstone explosions notwithstanding. Am I correct to guess that I am speaking to Lady Vetareh of Orr?"

This seems to catch her by surprise!

"I - yes? How do you - I mean, yes, I'm Vetareh, though I am not for the record a Lady, and, uh, I'm not mistaken in that Orr blew itself up five minutes after I left?"

"The story may have gotten embellished over the centuries. It sometimes calls you a princess, and says you saved the lives of somewhere between a few and a few hundred Orrians by closing a chaotic rift to the Mists from the other side. And I have been following—echoes of your voice, all over the place, commenting on the White Mantle's experiments. And you mentioned being from Orr, and believing that you were witnessing a fractal, so coupled with the clear deep understanding of magic the commentary suggested... I made a guess."

"Oh." Blink blink. "Good guess. I - I'm, I'm just surprised I was... remembered at all, much less had a story t-that," oh no, now she wants to cry, she wasn't forgotten and abandoned in the Mists, even when her entire country blew itself up, it's just that no one could find her...

Yeah. Yeah.

"While I may already be fifty percent of the way to doing so, would you like me to hug you?"

"I-if, you d-do, I will almost certainly start crying on you, s-so as long as you don't mind t-that," she mumbles, the waterworks already starting to begin despite her best efforts.

Yeah. He no longer has spikes, so he can hug her.

Oh, okay, then. Yeah. Crying time properly, then. She will just be sobbing out of a mix of relief, grief, and general emotions, of which there are many and most of which she doesn't know how to describe. Because, holy shit, she is out of the Mists and back in Tyria and she can feel so many things again, she's really in properly supported reality again, but also everyone she knows is already dead and in the Underworld, and there's a hot guy who is holding her and who arguably personally saved her and that also elicits some feelings and -

Suffice to say, there's a lot.

That's fine, he's not in- actually yes he is in a bit of a hurry but it's not so much of a hurry that he can't console someone who has been trapped in the Mists for two hundred and sixty years. With the spikes withdrawn his armour is actually quite soft, and despite his necromancerness he is warm.

He is warm and he has a heartbeat, and the air smells a little bit oversweet mixed with fire and dust, and her muscles finally feel like they're real, and she can feel thirst and hunger and pain and tiredness and everything the Mists denied her is back, now.

Her eyes sting with her tears, and her skin tingles at where it meets his, and everything sucks, but she's out, and that was so insanely improbable and unlikely, and this is such a stupid time for her to be crying, and she feels like she's not living up to the tales people told of her, apparently, which starts a whole new round of crying -

- eventually, she does manage some words.

"W-what, um. Y-year is it?"

"It's, uh, 1329AE."