E

Eterna

It still amazed Eterna how quickly she was adapting to life without technology.

Every day, she got dressed by hand and walked out of the castle to start work. She would use a map to find a location she hadn’t been to, then navigate her way on foot. If she got lost, she had to stop and ask local people for directions. Everywhere she went there was green grass, real trees with real leaves on them, and even actual living wildlife. It was bizarre. It was wonderful. For someone who had never been outside Kaldan city before, the stark change was such a shock to the system that her senses were permanently reeling from the explosion of new experiences. Creatively, she was on fire. She spent all day, every day in the incredible outdoors, sketching from morning until nightfall. When it rained, she camped under whatever shelter was available and kept sketching, even more thrilled at the new sights and smells conjured by a downpour.

Today, she’d found a place to make the muses quiver. An older map of the mainland indicated a swamp area at the edge of the Kingswood, just beyond the Elysium Forum. Eterna figured she could check it out and then head over to the fancy marble buildings if she didn’t see anything worth drawing, but the first sight of it as she stepped through the trees took her breath away.

It was incredible. Vibrant green pondweed completely obscured the colour of the water, which snaked lazily around in haphazard pools, eating greedily at the land. It was difficult to see where the land ended and the water began, since reeds and grasses sprouted indiscriminately from both. A grey heron stood in the water nearby, undisturbed by her presence. A sparkling turquoise dragonfly buzzed past, its oil-spill colours flashing in the low sunlight. Eterna’s fingers trembled slightly as she retrieved her DigiSketch Projector from her shade. She sat carefully down on a tree stump, instructed shade to stand behind her so as not to affect the view, and got stuck straight into it.

She barely paused for breath until the bunyip appeared.

As soon as she locked eyes with the hungry monster, Eterna knew she was dead. She froze immediately, staring straight at it, her jaw slack. She didn’t move until a wall of soil burst up from the ground in front of her, and even then she only jumped, dropping her digital pen onto the tablet. She must have hit the ‘x’ button by accident, because the application closed immediately. Eterna grabbed her pen and DigiSketch, leapt to her feet and backed around the tree stump, staring in horror as the demon tore down the earth wall. Shade was at her side in an instant, then in front of her. For the first time in her life, Eterna felt a pang of guilt and fear about the fact that she’d never installed any battle modules onto her shade. Abraxas had always told her to, and now she was going to regret it.

It was over almost as soon as it began. A man charged out of nowhere, commanding rope-vines with magic to seize the creature. He threw something at it which exploded into… a cloud of pollen? The creature sneezed violently, wormed its way free of the vines and bolted back into he water. The only evidence that it had ever been there at all was a couple of muddy footprints.

Eterna brushed her shade aside, staring at the scene and the man who had come to her rescue. Was he… was that… soil, for skin?

“Uh – yes – uh – no.” She stuttered extremely articulately, feeling herself flushing in embarrassment. Her heart was still beating at a thousand times an hour.

“Detecting elevated heartbeat and hard breathing,” her shade said in its monotonous voice. “Eterna, would you like me to engage a music module?”

Eterna sucked in her breath. “N-no, thank you, shade. Thank you, too,” she added to the strange man in earnest, hugging her DigiSketch Projector to her chest. “What was that thing?”

so grey is the face of every mortal