These Fonlands are unlike anything else. I have lived a long time and nothing amazes me like the things we see here.
Zaccheus is in his black cloak that hangs down to his feet and drags behind him. The hood on his head is large and his entire face is obscured from every angle. He looks like death, the popular personification with the black cloak and scythe, but Zaccheus grabbed a long wooden staff from the forest where he arrived in the Fonlands and was reunited with Coffey. The staff seemed perfectly carved to fit the contours of his hand, like it had grown specifically for him as he made his journey through the Fonlands. Coffey’s cougar friend told Zacchaeus that he would have to cross the Discs of Sakpata and Gû to arrive at the Disc of Xêvioso. He has hiked through the forest of the disc of Age and has been making his way through the jungle that overlaps with Sakpata’s disc.
The roaming beasts we’ve encountered in the jungle paint a very dreary picture of Sakpata’s disc. They say it is a hard, dry rock. But it must be a very nice rock, unlike anything we have ever seen on Earth. I am so eager to arrive there.
“Then use your power to move me faster,” Zaccachues says.
I am not my whole self, you know that.
“Then shut up,” Zacchaeus says. “I’ve never seen you like this. You’re so impressed by the Fonlands.”
And you aren’t? We are in the paradigm of nature, everything that the Earth has was here long before and is a bad copy of a copy.
“It is very nice, an honor to be here and all that. But I was somewhere else, I was doing something and we fell here by chance, and now you won’t let me leave until we see Xêvioso. And since that’s the case, let’s find him so I can get back.”
Why are you using my power to fight witches? How does that help me in any way?
“You got to eat razews! You love eating razews!”
They were delicious. But we have no responsibility to those people you were with. We have more than helped them and until they have more razews to eat, then I think we should stay out of their conflict with the witches.
“Is that why you don’t want to go back? Are you afraid of the witches? Oh man, the Needy is afraid of witches.”
I am not afraid of anything. I am the Needy. I inspire fear. But witches have mastery of primordial arcana that was old when I was still a child, that was cleaved from the Earth and now drifts as its moon. We were lucky to wield the light of first creation, a minor spell for those versed in moon magic. You can say I am afraid of witches, maybe it is fear, but it is also a recognition of my betters. I would be dumb to challenge a power greater than myself. I have no desire to perish, Zacchaeus, there are too many things that I have not consumed.
“The witches are that big a deal?”
You saw them seize the moon. Even a novice witch can wield massive powers if she happens upon the tools to unlock them. That is one reason moon magic is so unwieldy, it seeks a vessel to wreak havoc and the vessel loses all control. The magic takes over and seeks revenge for being banished to drift in space. The moon wants to reunite with the whole and it is a piece of Earth from a very ancient time. If the moon managed to reunite with Earth, it would be a hell none could imagine, but heaven for the moon.
“Great,” Zacchaeus says glumly. “Now I don’t want to go back either. You know based on that little story you just told me, we have to deal with witches. We can’t have them ending existence as we know it. That’ll make it hard to eat things too.”
We can just stay here. Why go back and risk it?
“Are you really ok being a fraction of yourself?”
No, I guess not. But we don’t have to rush back, with the time dilation, I think we can be here for years and still arrive back in the garden of the Museum minutes after we disappeared, if not seconds.
“Years, really? You like it here that much?” Zacchaeus looks around at the foliage of the jungle that is so vibrant that it seems alive in a way that plants he is used to aren’t. It is like they pulse with life, like there is a pulse pumping life through the leaves and stems, the sturdy trunks of trees. Most of the vegetation is high above his head and he stomps through the decay of the jungle floor in black boots that the Needy forms up to his thighs. It is slow going through the forest and something like a sun seems to set and then rise twice before the dirt becomes harder and Zacchaeus sinks into it less and less.
We must have arrived to Sakpata’s disc. I’m excited to see the wonders that this disc holds.
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