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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 137: Slade 295
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Kondor 303
For the first two days Slade rested, ate, reacquainted himself with the delights of a lovely wife, and slept more. On the third day, he pulled out his mirror and tried his own scrying spell, and found what she had already told him. It was a hot, dry wasteland.
On the fourth day, he woke to hear winds rushing over the land.
Leaving the comfort bubble with Shella by his side, he enjoyed the cooling breezes. Looking up into the sky, he saw that the winds aloft must be even faster because the clouds were visibly moving in a line across the sky. Maybe ten minutes later the rains started.
They lasted for over four hours, and stopped as abruptly as they had started. Rising out of their dry campsite which had been protected by the comfort bubble, the two watched as blue sky rapidly replaced the dark clouds. Running past them to the front and back were two voluminous rivers, forty feet across, rushing somewhere fast. Within two hours, the water, save for a few puddles, was gone, and the land steamed under the heat. Rising fog wreathed them, and had Shella dancing, and getting Slade to dance with her.
An hour later, the fog and puddles were gone, and both versers were hot and sweaty.
“I need to learn a shower spell,” Shella said, and Slade agreed. They were both damp, but the cool bubble and the magically summoned food took their mind off it.
The next day, Slade went walking to make sure they had been in a good spot. As far as he could see their spot was about as good as any. It was a large enough and high enough rock to be out of the floodwaters, and had sufficient space for anything they really needed to do. If he wanted to go for a run, he would have to leap from it across a small canyon about a foot wide and a dozen feet deep to climb down to a larger expanse of rock, but this was no difficulty.
The next day he started stress training in the heat. If he was here, as seemed probable, to learn how to cope with the heat of Muspelheim and the fire giants, then learning how to cope with and mitigate heat in combat was a problem he needed to solve. So he found himself a large chunk of rock with no sharp sides, and picked it up. Hefting it, he decided this was good enough. He entertained his wife that afternoon by alternately running, jogging, walking, high stepping, and hopping on one leg or two as she commanded from her perch on what they dubbed Home Rock, or Home Sweet Rock.
The two argued playfully about the name that evening in the not so terribly hot part of the day, which went into a tussle, which ended as such things typically did with them. In the end, they just used whatever name they felt like at the moment with Slade favoring Home Rock and Shella Home Sweet Rock.
In a few more days they had another fast-moving storm which dropped three hours of pounding water, made the temporary rivers appear, and faded into puddles and fog, returning to dry and hot again. This time, they used it to get a shower.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
