Welcome to Gaia! ::

The bog was not one of Emmerich’s usual haunts. The stinking putrid mess was enough to keep any sensible noulicorn out of smelling distance, but Emmerich had been unkindly gifted with the abilities to fix the wretched place and he wouldn’t shirk his duties because he didn’t like the air. It was slow going, trudging through water that sucked at his hooves with every step. He coughed sporadically as he waded, turning his nose into his own flank to stifle the noise. Birds cawed recklessly over his head, a raucous chortle of laughter. 

“Screw off,” he snarled at them, snapping his tail. 

He tried to squint out their shapes in the smog, but they weren’t much more than black shadows flitting around slightly less-black shadows. Impossible to track. Emmerich snorted. 

Something bright caught the corner of his eye. He whipped toward it, ears perked, muscles tensed and at the ready. The one agreeable thing about the bog being filled to the brim with nasty poisons was that predators stayed away from it too. You didn’t want to eat anything you’d catch here. 

Emmerich’s stance eased as he spotted the shape of a doe through the black fog. The brightness he’d witnessed must have been a spark of magic, but it hadn’t been much, or lasted very long. Maybe she was young, fresh to her magic, a brand new soldier fighting for Vykeli’s future. 

“Hey, you!” Emmerich shouted. He picked up his pace, sloshing through the bog water like a determined saw through hardwood. His legs ached. “Kid!” 

He’d been around the block. He could show a newbie some pointers to help her out. Better than slumping around the murk looking for the best patch of air to purify in a hundred mile murk of poisonous smog.

Emmerich hauled himself onto a peat bank near the young doe and shook the muck from his coat. It splattered the skeletal tree next to him and dropped back to the swamp with wet plops. Even after a second mighty shake, his shining dark coat remained drab with sludge. He’d clean it off later. Not like anyone was fresh as lily sprouts out here.

“Patrolling,” Emmerich replied, wincing as a thick spool of mud slopped from his mane. “I’m a scout.”

Not too many predators to worry about in the bog, but he’d pulled more than one foal to safety.

“Were you trying to clear off some of this fog?”

The question was redundant. He could smell the sphere of clean air around her, where the fog hadn’t yet rolled in, one tiny breathing hole in a stretch of poison smog. She seemed a little less hazy than the dead tree corpses surrounding them.

Atmos hadn’t been the gift Emmerich wanted when he approached Grandfather Tree. Truly he didn’t know what he wanted apart from a means to protect his sister, to fix his home. To earn his place in Homewood. What could an Atmos user do, really? Water plants and clear the air a bit. Biting chunks of pollution from the swamp like mosquitos, miniscule and ineffective.

Emmerich wanted to know what real water looked like. Elsie read him stories of oceans that stretched on farther than the horizon in endless waves of blue. Filled will fish and whales and all manner of sea monsters. But that came from books the Others left behind.

Did Vykeli even have an ocean?

“The bog needs healing too and it’s easy to get lost out here. Might not be any predators to watch out for, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need a patrol.”

This doe was practicing her magic out here herself, wasn’t she? Kids. Emmerich tamped down the urge to roll his eyes. Strutting about thinking s**t doesn’t apply to them. It wasn’t his job to point out the obvious, though, just to pull nouls out of danger, so he dropped the subject. He didn’t want to be patrolling the bog in the first place. He hated the smell, hated the muck, hated the dark poison clouds of fog that smothered everything and made it impossible to see more than two feet in front of your own nose.

But he was an Atmos user with an advantage for this cesspool.

“Emmerich.” The smog rolled thick between them. He shook his head to clear it away. “Thick is one word for this mess. I can… uh…” he paused, chewing his words.

He wasn’t a sage. He helped train new scouts when they came in, but those were different circumstances with different expectations. Still, one more fighter against the things poisoning Vykeli wasn’t something Emmerich could walk away from.

“I could help you out with your gift, if you want. I’m Atmos, too.”

Family outside the bog? Did she mean outside Homewood? What kind of a*****e family would raise their kids on the edge of this poisonous mess? Emmerich’s lip curled into a snarl. He knew what that was like, scratching out a bleak existence in Vykeli’s lifeless landscape. His initial ire for the doe fizzled away. If she was raised here, she’d have reason to scoff at visiting Homewooders.

He wanted to snap at her, screw her family. They weren’t worth the dirt they walked on, raising foals out here. But that was her choice. Every muscle urged to stop her, but he wouldn’t.

Mist in the barrens cracked him from the dismal hole he swirled. He laughed, a deep bark of a noise that rumbled his chest.

“When I got my first ability - purify - I was tempted to try it out in the barrens,” he snorted. A damned desert with nothing but hot, dry air. “Nothing out there to purify.”

He could imagine her attempt at using mist in that arid heat. She might get a bit of fog going, but it would evaporate before she could take a breath. Might work at night when the air cooled.

“Purify is a lot more useful out here, but there’s a s**t ton of smog to clear away.” He didn’t know what good it did chipping away in bits and pieces. The gaseous poison never seemed to diminish. Still, he could do better than Misty’s earlier attempt. Age and experience, whatever.

“I know it’s tempting to just shove it all out at once, but if you let the magic build up inside you for a bit, you’ll get a better shot at it.”

To demonstrate, he lowered his head and slammed his eyes shut, concentrating on the steady beat of his own heart. He plucked at his earlier anger - foolish does and a*****e families - let it grow, throb, inflame. He stomped and let it burst from him, a momentary blue-grey glow around his horn that cascaded away in pulsing orbs, devouring fog.

He opened his eyes to a bubble of clean air around them.

That scoff had Emmerich’s hackles up. Who was this kid? Hot-headed and smart-mouthed, she was definitely making her way to Emmerich’s s**t list. But she was still a kid, and Emmerich needed to rein his own temper in. He’d been brash and disrespectful in adolescence, and Elsie might say he hadn’t entirely grown out of that, but he wouldn’t rise to anger with a kid.

Defeated his purpose, scouting out here to help people.

“You keep working on yours, kid,” he gruffed.

He tried to squint through the smog, but everything was grey shadows outside the bubble he’d made for them. He had no idea where this doe was headed or if she knew how to get there. He might not have liked her much, but he wasn’t going to walk away without offering to help.

“You want some help getting back to your family?”

If he met them, he’d give them a verbal beat down about raising kids out here in the murk.

Her story was getting worse. Despite Emmerich calling her “kid”, she was definitely an adult, but a young one. Too young for her family to just up and leave her behind like that. How was she supposed to find anyone in the bog? Let alone a group of nouls that kept on the move. It was impossible. The swamp ate up most tracks and you didn’t want to hunt for scents with bubbles popping poisonous fumes next to you.

“Sure… Misty.” Emmerich chewed his next words. It would be more than a day’s journey to cover the bog’s length in a straight shot, ancestors' knew how long it would take to zigzag after a trail. He craned his head vaguely toward Homewood, frowning. He had duties to everyone there, not just this filly hopped up on being temperamental. But if he walked away, he’d worry about her, and he’d probably never figure out if she made it back to her family or not.

“What if you can’t find them?” She’d said herself that was possible. “How long are you gonna search the bog?”

Every breath filled their lungs with toxins that would take days - or a good healer - to fumigate. She’d catch the black cough if she spent too long out here in a fruitless search.

Emmerich knew all too well what happened to flesh stewing too long in putrid water. First thing he’d do when he returned would be to sink shoulder-deep in a spring and wash the muck off. And, tomorrow before his neck watch, he’d visit a healer to check for scrapes or cuts that might be infected. He’d seen noulicorns leave nicks infected by the bog until the skin blackened with disease and sloughed off the bone. Better to visit healers often and catch that s**t before necrosis set in.

He looked up at the darkening sky, the sliver of pale moonlight wheezing through the fog. Unfortunately for him, his patrol wasn’t up yet. He’d be out here into the night. At least most predators steered clear of the bog.

“Nah,” he called to Misty’s back as she waded away. “Gotta keep an eye out for a while. Stay safe, heading back.”

The bog was horrible at night, but Emmerich imagined it was that much worse for someone swallowed by the muck, alone and afraid. At least the kid lived in Homewood now, she’d be alright. Emmerich had done the same when he was younger than her. Took off with his sister in search of Homewood, leaving their parents to their meandering nomadic lifestyle. He wished Misty wouldn’t bother coming back to search for her family, but she probably would.

And Emmerich would probably run into her again while scouting the swamp.