Deyasmera

Deyasmera, meaning: scorched earth, lit. burnt open sea

Deyasmera likes to experiment with magic. She likes to stand convention on its head, using unorthodox ways to achieve ordinary results and to use usual and known methods to discover something new and bizarre. She has found methods to increase soil fertility with flame arcs, ways to levitate objects with electromagnetism that by all known laws of nature should not be able to levitate through electromagnetism, and much more. She pushes the limit of possibility, discovering new and strange things to make life just a little bit interesting...

Or she did. Until the colony she was a part of collapsed. The cured-sap metropolis tumbled off the cliff in a shower of razor-sharp resin shards and other faes who could not fly through the death shower, and she had to help, do whatever she could. In a cataclysmic display of magic, Deyasmera pulverized half the falling colony and magnetized the rest to hang in place in mid-air until the last of the faes caught up in the fall had made it out. The colony fell down once more, but so did Deyasmera- spent and overexerted.

It took her a long time to recover from her feat. Her physical body was completely fine after just a couple of weeks, but her magical essence had been severely torn, hanging onto her with barely a thread. In the weeks and months that followed, Deyasmera was forced to live completely without using magic lest she lose the ability completely, and slowly, slowly she recovered. Eventually she could draw magical energy from the environment against wield it almost like she used to, but her internal storage was no more.

Deyasmera had conflicting feelings about it all- she had saved the lives of dozens if not hundreds of other faes, but at the same time Deyasmera herself was severely damaged. In cosmic scales her own life weighed against all the others she’d saved was nothing, and it had been the ‘right thing to do’, and in the moment she had not even hesitated. But she was sad and bitter at times, trying to tell herself that she wished she hadn’t done it. But deep down, she wasn’t. If the situation ever came, she’d do the same again in a heartbeat. It took her a long time to come to grips with it all, and the slow restoration of her magical side helped a lot.

Never one to rest on her bearings, Deyasmera began experimenting again. A few explosions and mildly life-threatening scenarios later she found the perfect way to channel ambient magic through her, bypassing the damaged part of her completely like an obsolete circuit and out again through her refined mind to affect the world around her. Next she acquired batteries, trying her hand at using tamed lightning to fuel her thirst for magic. After one too many exploded on her face she turned to alchemical and magical batteries with slightly more success. She even tried wild lightning storms, but the uncontrollable, unrefined, and unforgiving energy of a raw lightning was too much for her and she had to spend months recovering again.

She eventually resumed her work with various alchemical batteries, energy crystals and runestones. She achieved adequate and even good results, especially with combinations of different types of storing energy, but nothing could compare to the internal magic well of a lightning dragon.

Deyasmera began acquiring different types of crystals, stones, and batteries from different sources, from different mages or manufacturers or mines, in effort to find the very best method. Some blew up, some worked better than others for what she needed, some contained a wrong sort of energy altogether. Deyasmera resorted to the black market, doing complex and tasking spells using up most of the stores she’d acquired to procure rarer and more obscure crystals and runestones, each stranger than the other.

After a particularly laborious chain of trades, she got an exceptionally shady bogsneak to give her a strange crystal whose energy she could feel throbbing to be released from half a mile away. He was reluctant to let it go, but she managed to convince him that it was unstable and might blow up without a warning at any moment, and he finally relinquished it. It cost Deyasmera everything she had to spare for possible future trades and more, but finally holding it in her claws, she knew that this was the one. This crystal, wherever it had come from, and the energy it contained- it was what she’d been looking for all this time and better than she’d even hoped to imagine.

With reverence and care, Deyasmera tried some spells with the crystal as an energy source, and it was perfect. The perfect balance of familiar, untamed, and lightning- if was as if she was holding in her hands what she’d lost.

But it would not do. The crystal was small, as far as charged energy crystals go, and the power within it was finite. No; what she needed now was the source.

Deyasmera tracked the bogsneak down with some effort, and to the best of her ability both questioned and threatened him into telling where he’d gotten the crystal. He did not know where it came from but she got the name of the dragon he’d gotten it from, and immediately she set off. What followed was a chain of shady dealers and detectivework, until finally, finally Deyasmera got her hands on the spiral who under threat to life and limb confessed that he’d stolen it from an ancient snapper that-a-way, from a lair two and a half day’s flight away.

The flight took her seven days. By the three day mark she thought the spiral had lied to just get rid of her, but she kept on going- she was very small, after all. However, at roughly noon on the fourth day, she knew the spiral had told her the truth. It was faint in the air, like when the wind blows from northwest for several days straight, and she might not have felt it if she hadn’t felt the crystal, the shard, the microscopic smidgen of what was ahead. For three more days she flew, until she came to the promised lair with aching wings and completely exhausted, and proceeded to pass out right then and there.

When Deyasmera woke up, she felt giddy and almost hysterical with energy- she was there! The air was so heavy and saturated with the already familiar charge that she felt like she had eels for blood. She shot up from the sickbed she’d been laid on and scared the living daylights out of the dragon coming to care for her and buzzed and darted around like a demented hummingbird, trying to locate the very source of the energy through the enormous interference. She was sure the source would be truly a magnificent sight to behold, perhaps a shining pillar of charged crystal rooted deep into the heart of the Shifting Expanse, perhaps a previously overlooked tangle of ley lines, perhaps Stormcatcher in all of his electriciness has been here-

Deyasmera halted in place in mid-air, only her wings working on autopilot to hold her aloft. She’d come eye to eye with a young imperial. A young imperial with a mane frizzled with static, tired and pained bright cyan eyes, and the unmistakable aura of power that Deyasmera had been chasing all this time. She’d found her source.