#clueless-tarnished

A voice spoke up from behind Izar

(jumpscare the izar who is focused in her books)

The winged serpents were at first baffled by having their snouts booped without the culprits getting caught and punished for it. With his influence over flame, Messmer lights up the dark chamber in search of those giggling young voices. The serpents for their part, flicked their tongues relentlessly to trace a scent back to its source.

Solis waddles over. Holding her giant forti plushie. The same with Luna and her giant lany plushie. They looked ready to hear a story.

"Wha' ye s'owy? Acwoss ye fog?"

Luna asks Tía

[Asking Tía Castella about where she came from]

“Oh? Are you two asking about where I came from?”

She thought for a moment about her home of Marren.

“It’s a beautiful place, full of sun. Lots of farming… there’s the coast, where fishermen haul in their catches. It’s a very beautiful place.”

"What are you doing my dream?"

Like it was normal question to ask in such an odd place

"I am surprised you're asleep at all," the 'child' said with some amusement. "Do you know how hard it is to get people to sleep? Or... humans, rather. Other things sleep far more often."

They smiled. The 'child' was androgynous, with golden hair and braids that covered most of their face and obscured their eyes entirely. They wore white robes and their arms had far too prominent veins on what flesh was visible. They seemed to have an air of unreality to them, but that was the nature of dreams.

Little Luna looks at Izar. She was purring and making omen biscuts. These stars have her interested

[bless baby omen biscuts]

Izar will never not melt at the purring of a baby omen. She smiles down at Luna. ‟…hm, do you want to take a look at my map? There’s plenty of stars there.”

Again they meet in a dream. Nouma not being confused this time when seeing this child. She greeted him with a smile

"My home can be colder than the Mistwood, yes."

The Haligtree might have been warm due to the way those kinds of trees altered the landscape if able to grow large enough, but unlike the Erdtree, there'd still been periods of snow. (An odd thing, the difference...)

Stealing from one, however, is a different story. These lands may not be Umbra’s homelands, but dragons hoard treasure everywhere—it is known. And an ancient dragon like the one he spotted a few days ago, red lightning crackling around its massive form, must have a most glorious hoard. After all, it has probably spent centuries—if not millennia—amassing shiny riches.

Now here he stands, in what should be the dragon’s abode, and feels profoundly betrayed.

It has cost him a lot of time and effort to find this place. Keeping to the shadows, he has watched the dragon circle overhead, land beyond the treeline, reappear hours later. Patience and silence; even shrouded in the gloom of the Abyss itself, Umbra knows a dragon’s keen senses might still detect him. Not something he’d like to happen.

He has waited for the dragon’s absence before venturing deeper into the forest, startled by the lack of obvious tracks. Apart from a few branches bent and broken where the dragon must have landed, there are almost no signs of a large creature moving through. And what signs there are have led him to a small hut. A dragon would never fit into it.

Perhaps he should keep searching?

He stares at the miserable belongings he has found here—nothing even remotely looking like it could be part of a dragon’s hoard. There’s clothing. Tiny flasks and oil-stanched rags, probably to clean a blade. There are also a few pieces of paper pinned to the wall, covered in charcoal scribblings that look an awful lot like something a child would draw—one seems to be an oddly happy family of stick figures.

Umbra snorts, but doesn’t touch the drawings—annoyed with his own reluctance to tear them down.

There is also a pouch, small and weathered, and it contains a handfull of these tiny nut-like things that aren’t nuts but glow with a golden light from within, and shimmer more beautifully when one breaks them. Runes, he has been told. He finds one that is bigger than the others, its golden glow both deeper and brighter. He weighs it in his hand; this is worth something.

Far from the treasure he has hoped to find, but he’ll settle for this rather than a flask of oil.