It's that time again...
That's right! More EverCrack fic!



It's warm in the sun, in this realm. Her tail twitches lazily as she sits and watches the spirits.

She knows a lot about spirits. She's a shaman, though her furred race follow no gods and aren't too sure about believing in them. It might be a semantic thing, of course. Perhaps what other races call a god is actually just another type of spirit?

They've another body, her soul-linked clan, a spell-caster whose mind works faster than hers, and also follows no god. But he sits and is distracted by the assaults to his innocence -- the leather-clad, the flirtatious, the cat peoples themselves whose shoulders he barely comes up to, and is therefore face to face with mammaries whenever he's in that area. It makes him uncomfortable and curious and a little embarrassed, but he's learning to appreciate it as he follows around a young, hot-headed thiefling of his kind.

So it is the shaman who sits. The elven druid is wiser, but distracted by beliefs in her god. The shaman will have to have enough wisdom for all of them, and enough knowledge of spirits.

There are the living spirits, as she likes to call them. The ones who run and play and joke. The ones who are living the afterlife of battle or the prelude to their next incarnation. She'll think about them later, because an idea is teasing at her mind, another distinction that she's not yet turned over in her head.

There are the second class next -- the guards and merchants and beings whose only purpose seems to be to send one on never-ending errands that they forget about almost as soon as it is performed. Sometimes they are combined -- a guard may challenge the skill of a youngling, demanding a proof of a completed mission, or a merchant do likewise. Those spirits are task-spirits, really. They have one, maybe two things to do, and they do it. And nothing else. They rarely laugh on their own, rarely speak at all and even then, only in patterns that repeat eternally.

There is no real change in the world, in the realms, save that wrought within the living spirits themselves.

The third class of spirit are the monsters, the fighting-spirits. The creatures that exist only to be slain and enhance the power of the living spirits, or provide hides and other goods that can be used to create more useful things. They appear from nowhere, or drop out of the sky, and no matter how many a living spirit -- or another fighting spirit, for they sometimes will battle each other -- or guard-task spirit kills... there will be more fighting spirits later.

And then there is the fourth kind... But she is distracted, for a living spirit has come, and is asking for spirt speed, asking to be blessed with the nature of the wolf that runs fast. Can you cast that? the small, fur-footed being asks.

She nods, and stands. She concentrates, the world going gray and distant, with the only target, the only reality being this little halfling before her. Because if this is her only reality, so will it be to the spirits she calls as shaman. The magic energies begin to gather at her hands, glowing brightly, but she pays that no heed. She gestures, pleading, asking, indicating the being on whose behalf she intervenes, and calls out, Wolf! Wolf spirit! Heed me!

The wolf's nature settles over the little one like a cloak, the helper spirit pleased enough to lend its speed. She sees it wolf-grin at her, tongue lolling, for a moment before it fades.

Thanks! says the pleased halfling. She smiles in return. We -- I like to help.

She sits as the other living spirit runs off. Guiding the spirits, calling them -- that takes energies that she should replenish. And so she sits and thinks on replenishing them.

She'll think about the kinds of living spirit later.




In other news, I'm very tired, and can't seem to NOT wake up early. Bluh.