Kaolin Lifts Kerrick from the Fall
Kaolin lifts back onto a bluff after its edge collapses beneath the scribe. They had been talking on a verdant highland bluff above a lean corundum mine, Kaolin scratching a baby Archtyrex stryder under its chin and zigzagging a stone with an unseen force for the stryderling to chase. He had been a great general once, memorialized in stone, until the jade coursing through the ground carried the earth's spirit into his statue and woke an awareness beyond it.
"Protect the unprotected," he says of his purpose now. "Destroy that which only lives to destroy." Kerrick stands to stretch. His patch of the bluff gives way, and he falls screaming and praying to every god he can think of until his descent slowly reverses and he hangs face to face with Kaolin again.
"We all come from earth, but today you shall not return to it," Kaolin tells him, smiling. Kerrick thanks him profusely and, done with cliffs for the day, leaves him to his meditations.
Kaolin's turning from general to statue to Earth Spirit comes as Kerrick heard it on the bluff, with no name for the stryderling or the land that raised the general's monument.
- Earth Spirit
