Ca’armine has trouble settling down, the first few days in the wild. The last few days his world—did he even think of “world” in the same way before?—has been turned upside down. The sense, of not feeling Raiden’s presence, haunts him. And now? Raiden is there when Ca’armine reaches out, but it’s different somehow. He doesn’t know how exactly, yet. Things are different.
The monastery wasn’t there anymore. Tumble down stones, he imagined– but they weren’t there. Every member of the team, walked past the clearing. All of them saw it. All of them looked a second time. None of them stopped.
We knew things were different right then. We were back in the world. But things were deeply different.
On the third day—praying to Raiden every day, communing with his god, but on a level that maintained, rather than grew, their bond—he realized that he was different.
Not the person who had walked into Nodden-Tor.
First he prepared his spells for the day, then he checked in with his team to let them know he would be away. He put on his pack, with nothing in it but a water skin and a blanket, strapped a knife on his belt, and set forth. After a few minutes, he picked up speed and ran across the clearings between trees, to get space between himself and the area he had already explored, hunted, and knew well.
He did not stop to forage or hunt on the first day, so when night came he laid down hungry. He woke up with the sun, already feeling better. Today he did not commune with Raiden. He got up and started running.again.
Before the sun got back to midheaven, though, he felt the fatigue start to slow him, and he started hunting instead. The knife was the wrong tool, so he made a spear. He found a muddle of rabbit tracks in a bit, and held still by a maple tree until the rabbits felt confident to leave their holes. He got two. Tying them up he started looking for downed wood and a place to build a fire.
Along with the wood, he found some mushrooms. Intrigued, he examined them. When crushed the stems turned blue. He gathered all of them, and he moved on with cooking. Why not grab some salt on the way out of camp! Ca’armine laughed at himself and ate the damn coneys. With some of the mushrooms.
Things got different then.
Eating the bluing mushrooms, had been an important point in his first months away from the Raidensblud. Long ago, there was a random night at a random inn, when a fellow-traveler had offered him a soil-bound cluster of the same type, warning him they were “strong.” They roamed around together that night, until Rion—Ca’armine thought he was probably a thief by trade though he said he was in “real estate”—said he needed to lie down. That was the night Ca’armine realized that, he must be a servant of Raiden, without being a tool of the Raidensblud. It was compicated, it was intense, it was revelatory. For awhile he thought he might be a druid.
Ca’armine spent the whole night under the stars that night, communing with Raiden and feeling the earth. The mushrooms made him vomit of course, they always did—so in the morning he felt the pangs of hunger intensely. When the partridges came out in the early morning he knocked one down with a well-aimed stone, and cooked breakfast in the same fire. He started walking back to the party’s loose encampment.
When he resumed his training the next day, and rejoined his comrades in training activities, he found a change in his perspectives. An additional dimensionality—time, frequently, fittingly—using greater spell complexity to achieve greater effects. Finding capacity for closer and more frequent communion with Raiden. Expanding on the ability to protect from, and even to purge, evil attachment. Growing more powerful.
This world might be different from the one where he was born. But it’s the world where he lives. Where he serves Raiden.
Thereafter, he spends time every day seeking out components from the forest around, especially bluing mushrooms, and making incense with those components.
