Chapter 417: 59: One Path and Many

Eventually, the liquid darkness came to an end and ZipZing washed ashore. Above her, stars glittered in a night sky. She couldn't say for certain whether or not they matched the stars of the sky over the Empire, but she thought that they were fewer and brighter.

They made her think of the night sky within the Sandman's dreams. The sandy shore beneath her added to that impression, but when she sent the particles of her light cantrip spinning outward, the sand beneath those small lights sparkled in a rainbow of colors, instead of the golden shade of dreams.

A dark trail of small splotches on the sand drew her attention. There were no footprints accompanying them, and they looked almost like blood. A feeling like a cold shiver of trepidation crawled across her skin, and Danika blinked and examined her own arms.

She would swear that she didn't actually feel frightened, but the cool creeping sensation argued otherwise. She gave a small exasperated huff, and zipped along the trail of probable drops of blood. She was actually a little startled when she zipped over a small rise and discovered a landscape littered with glowing objects. The light they emitted seemed kind of lazy though, because the darkness between the lights was still nearly pure black, and she hadn't noticed any glow from the ground from the dark side of the slope.

The trail of dark droplets led straight toward the closest light, so Danika zipped forward. The shining light seemed to be a sort of spiked and rounded stone. If it had been floating instead of embedded in the dark rainbow colored sand, she might have called it a three dimensional star. With that thought, she looked around again and her perspective seemed to tilt.

A minute later she decided that the stars overhead were actually more glowing stones, and that the sandy plain was actually cylindrical, because the slope behind her was just a dark empty space, and ahead the lights seemed more crowded but dimmer, as though they outlined a vast tunnel stretching into the distance. She would have zipped upward to see, but she was afraid she would not be able to find the ominous trail of splotches again.

She dropped to the sand, touched one of the darker spots, and shivered. Her shiver made her automatically check her health, but it was still full. She looked around for Hikaru's light, and didn't see it at first. She had to dim her own light before she spotted the firefly perched on her own back, where her pebble usually rode in its harness.

"Sorry," she apologized to her pet. "I didn't think we'd get separated from Jade, and if he carried the garden then he could keep carrying all of us forward when we had to log out."

She looked at the sand under her feet. She'd scuffed the dark marking when she'd turned around looking for Hikaru, but it felt as cold and dry as the rest of the sand. If it was blood then it wasn't the pig's, because it was old. Either that or the little pig was a lot farther ahead than she expected. She shivered again and launched herself back into the air.

A while later, Danika decided that teleporting to her mark on the little pig was taking her backward. It was difficult to tell, because it wasn't taking her to the pig, and she'd traveled far enough that the tunnel of stone stars embedded in sand extended in both directions. She was basing her decision mostly on the fact that the cold seemed less bitter after she teleported, and the farther she traveled the colder it seemed to get.

She used up another good health potion and contacted Jade, who replied: "It is likely that this path can only be traveled alone. I do not think my instance of the path is the same as yours, because now I am having to cut my way through thick thorns in order to progress toward you. This root used to be a simple path, but the one that ran beneath the dwarven kingdoms was both one and also many, none alike. It's like the beginner's vales that are cradled between the other side of the roots."

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Danika decided that it meant that the skill was actually moving her to where the pig was on its own path, but not into its path. At least the pig also seemed to be following the trail of drops, since she was able to find it again easily. She could apparently travel faster than the pig, so she decided to follow her party compass to Jade's location to test the theory. It didn't take her long, but like the pig, there was no trace of him even when her compass insisted that she was right next to him.

Jade insisted that he was still traveling through a passage crowded by large thorns, but Danika was still in the vast tunnel studded in stone stars. Jade thought that the paths would lead to the same place, where the Emperor waited, so Danika turned again and zipped onward as swiftly as she could.

A while later, she was seriously questioning why she was continuing onward instead of using her teleport to mark skill, and returning to Shrubbery's tree where a warm garden waited. She was so cold that she could see frost on her own claws, and every breath looked like the smoke that a fantasy dragon would puff out. The cold was growing steadily more intense the farther she traveled.

She couldn't even bring herself to complain about the one hot spot on her back, where Hikaru was spitting out a continuous chain of spark cantrips to warm itself. She was healing as fast as the little sparks damaged her, and she was tired of freezing too. She was still following the trail of dark splotches, for no real reason other than that they seemed to always continue forward.

Sometimes the marks dwindled to nearly nothing, but then they reappeared just a bit farther on in a spattered pattern, and resumed their dark trail. Shrubbery and Kit logged off for the night after ShinZing logged in. In a way, it pleased her that they seemed to feel like they could leave after he arrived, even though he couldn't assist her any better than they could. It made her own relief seem more rational.

ShinZing messaged her after only a few minutes online: "I can't teleport to my mark on you, I get a notification that tells me that you are not within the Empire. What are you doing? Shrubbery just said that you were chasing a flying pig through a root before she left?" His little bat did not linger beside her while she read, it dropped the message and vanished.

She replied: "That's actually pretty much the summary of what I'm doing, although we kind of started out by trying to help Jade find the path that he said would lead him to where he could speak to the Emperor without dying."

The snow leopard cub that carried her message away looked especially fluffy and warm, and her own reply made her question why she wasn't just following him to ShinZing. Jade was on the path he'd been looking for. The flying pig was interesting, but even if she continued she might not find anything more about it. She could also cheat and ask her assistant about it after she logged out.

Somehow she just couldn't quite bring herself to flee from the burning cold. She laughed at herself and whispered to Hikaru, "Abandoning a curious path goes against my way of the dragon." It probably went against the way of the cat too, even if it wasn't listed, since the King had come to carry her message away himself.

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