Thistle

or maybe rosette? or trail??

Originally:


from phosphie:

Turkey Time: Return of the Omen of Destiny 2: Ultimate Edition

Thistle pushed, shoved, and wriggled his way through a dense and vibrant crowd of assorted fairgoers. Some were naïve tourists dressed in the finery of larger settlements. Others were the unscrupulous rogues, pickpockets and merchants of snake oil who lived to prey on the unsuspecting.

Any fair worth its salt had patrons like these. But the Night Faire, shrouded in secrecy as it was, attracted a third sort. The mystic types, those seeking dark and occult magics that were shunned by the wiser majority. The Faire drew them in like greedy, ambitious moths to a flame so bright it obscured the sinister shadow of that same magic. If one were to seek magical power in a place like this, they would need to be extraordinarily careful, lest they fall victim to its consuming light.

Thistle, however, didn’t care about any of this.

He wasn’t a magic seeker. He also wasn’t a tourist, or even a crook, though he’d often suspected he would probably make a decent pickpocket, due to his propensity for being overlooked. But no, he was… just Thistle. In truth, the Faire didn’t offer much that Thistle really wanted.

But it was his home. The only one he’d ever had.

At the moment, he was finding that home increasingly irritating. The thick crowd and the ever-present shouting and self-promoting from every booth wasn’t exactly pleasant on the best of nights, but on this night in particular, well, it was a special sort of pain.

He needed to get somewhere, urgently, and it was in a part of the Faire he hadn’t ventured into in a handful of years. The humming core of the Crafter’s Ring, where the shadiest of all smithery took place. The Avenue of Meat Mechanics.

To make matters worse, he could hardly see. His loss of vision wasn’t due to any of the mundane reasons a dragon’s sight might deteriorate— old age, battle damage, withering curses, and so on— but rather it was due to the large volume of dark, syrupy fluid leaking from his eyes like oil from a broken pipe.

It was gross.

He managed to squirm out of the densest part of the crowd, darting beneath a tall and regal-looking Imperial into the relative quiet of the Avenue. Relative being an important word here: on either side of the dirt path, makeshift factories whirred with churning gears, clanking metal, and belching smokestacks.

And the smell. If anyone had expected a place called the Avenue of Meat Mechanics to smell like candy and roses, well, it didn’t.

This must be the place, Thistle thought, coming to a stop in front of some kind of large, haphazard factory structure. With his foreclaw, he scraped away a glob of shadow goop from his eyes to look more clearly.

Over the doorway was a rough rectangular strip of steel, surrounded by blinking lights in blue and orange. It bore a crude but undeniably bombastic illustration of an orange coatl dressed in a leather labcoat. Her hide was traced with jagged lines, breaking it up into sections of slightly different shades.

It also said, in large letters just below the image, TURKEY TIME.

Subtle, Thistle thought.

He walked over to the door, a huge bulky thing made of reinforced steel and shored up with bolts as thick as an Imperial’s claw. Turkey wasn’t taking any chances when it came to thieves or spies, it seemed.

Thistle knocked, producing a dull bang on the metal door. He was a little apprehensive. Turkey had a reputation among the Night Faire’s regulars. There was a reason the Avenue was so frequently visited. A reason other than the ever-present smell of smoke and flesh. Whether she was actually dangerous or just eccentric, Thistle couldn’t say. They’d only met on a few brief occasions. But it was enough to have him ever so slightly on edge.

Not that he really had a choice. If anyone could fix his eye, it would be the self-professed Meat Magician herself.

A tinny voice came through the door, buzzing through some crude speaker. “Who’s there?”

“Thistle.”

“Thistle?”

“Um, from the woods.”

“Thistle from the woods…” There was a brief pause, the silence filled by static crackling. “Oh, yes, yes, the young Mirror. What brings you to my door?”

“I need a favor.”

“Oh ho ho ho! Then by all means, come in.”

He tried the door. It didn’t budge. A moment later, a series of loud mechanical clacks and bangs sounded out from behind the door, and it swung open of its own accord.

Well, so far so good.

The inside of Turkey’s lab was a mess. The walls of the hallway were smooth metal, until they were suddenly made of a dented, rusted material. More than once in the time it took him to reach the end of the hall, he was forced to climb over piles of junk and machinery. Whistle had heard Turkey was only planning to stay in the Faire for a short time, but that she’d ended up staying longer and longer, adding more and more to her laboratory. Now that he was here, he could see the truth to those rumors.

There was another door at the end of the hall. Much smaller, and much less secure; just a simple slab of metal, hanging slightly ajar. He could hear voices from the other side.

With a bit of lingering apprehension, Whistle nudged the door open and entered the room.

Immediately upon entering the room, he was blinded by an intense, painful light, so bright even the muck around his eyes couldn’t block it out.

“Ow! What is that?”

“Oh. Um, sorry about that,” a voice said. He recognized the voice, though it took him a moment to place it, disoriented as he was.

“Thera?!”

“Oh, hi, Thistle. Been a while.”

Thistle had met Thera a few years earlier. She’d helped him out, given him some advice about surviving around the Faire, even a place to stay for a short while. He sort of thought of her as an aunt, if aunts were weird and aloof and obsessed with the acquisition of magic power. He supposed some aunts were probably like that.

“Why’s it so bright in here?” Whistle asked, covering his eyes with claw and fin.

“That’s Thera,” said another voice. Turkey, most likely. Brash, with a bit of a squawk to it.

“I kind of exploded,” Thera said.

“You what.”

“Only a little. Here, I can dim it. One sec.”

“How can you explode a little?”

“She would have exploded a lot without my help,” said Turkey.

“Okay,” Thera said. “That should be better.”

Cautiously, Thistle opened his eyes. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting to see, but he was surprised nonetheless.

Thera’s body had come undone.

Most of… her was a swirling tempest of golden light. What had once been gleaming cracks tracing the Skydancer’s hide had become a storm that consumed all but a few dark claws and feathers. Her head was the most intact part of her body, but even it was broken in half, her lower jaw entirely gone. She seemed to be held together mostly by pieces of metal and straps of leather, crossing thinly around her fluctuating form.

It was like a sun had been born inside her.

“What… happened?” Thistle asked. Even with Thera’s attempt to dim her light, she was still painfully bright to look at. He shifted his gaze to Turkey instead, who was wearing a complex headpiece and a pair of black goggles. Eye protection, it seemed.

“She finally got what she wanted,” Turkey said.

“Exploding?”

“True power over light and dark,” said Thera. Her voice was humming with some sort of strange radiance. “I’ve become incandescent with power!”

“She’s an idiot,” Turkey said with a grin. “But she’s a very, very interesting idiot!”

“I am an eclipse of true magic potential! I embody light and shadow! I am an unstoppable force of gleaming glory!”

She kept talking, but Thistle sort of tuned her out. He asked Turkey, “What’s she doing here? Is that your tech?”

Turkey smirked. “Indeed it is! She came to me in need of someone to help her contain her powers. But her greed for magic was too much for her, alas…” She made an exaggerated sad face, before immediately lighting up with another excited grin. “So she came to me, once more, to have me stitch her back together!”

“Huh.” Whistle looked back over at Thera, squinting through the muck in his eyes. She was apparently done with her rant.

“And now we’re business partners,” Thera said.

“Yes! She is a competent assistant! Except for all the lab materials she destroys with her radiant aura.”

“Sorry about that.”

“So much glassware, down the drain…” Turkey sighed. “But! That’s in the past, and I for one prefer to look to the future! Tell me, Thistle from the woods… what’s up?”

“Well, I’ve got all this goop stuff coming out of my eyes,” he said, gesturing with a claw. “It just sort of started one day. I think it’s a curse?”

“Oh, yes. Hm.” Turkey walked over to him, leaning uncomfortably close to examine the black goo. She produced a small test tube, somehow, and took a sample. She spent a few moments inspecting it closely, muttering to herself. The black lenses of her goggles swapped out for magnifying glasses. “Yes! I see! It’s pure shadow essence!”

“It’s what?” Thera said, looking over in what seemed like interest, though it was hard to tell.
“Yes! Pure elemental shadow, discerned with ease by the great Turkey, who strikes yet another decisive victory for science.”

“Then that’s…” Thera came closer, pushing Turkey out of the way to get a closer look. Whistle squinted in the sudden glare. “This is the mark of the Shadowbinder!”

“Oh, really?” Thistle said.

“It signifies power and a destiny chosen by the Shadowbinder herself.”

“Cool. Can you guys get it off me?”

“Thistle, this is a sacred symbol!”

“Thera’s right,” said Turkey. “We shouldn’t be hasty here! This could be an opportunity to shake the foundations of magical research as we know it!”

“Well, the sacred symbol is gross. Fix it or I’ll find someone else.”

Turkey frowned for a long moment, then looked to Thera. Something passed wordlessly between them, something unspoken. Then Turkey turned back to Whistle and grinned.

“No need for that, no need for that. I think we’ll all be able to get what we want.”