- The jade lady is the one of the last of her kind- a True Dragon - able to survive the breaking of the world due to the dual nature of this place.
- She is also dying- the ties that bind her little pocket realm are weakening. The presence of Thieria's tree, though, may have bought her some time.
- She may be able to make their blade, but it may cost her dearly. She says their maker may yet find them.
- Back at camp, a storm sweeps in - and far off on the horizon rises a massive and twisted spire: a hell-like tree
The grotto before you glitters beautifully in soft greens and blues, a softly glowing cavern lined in pieces of brilliant jade. The waters below glitter, as moisture rains down from shafts of light high above. The jade that covers the bottoms of these pools are all in uniform large shield shaped pieces. There is an electricity in the air here, and it feels both more real and alive than you've ever felt, and at once impossible, dreamlike, as though the world around you is malleable and untethered. Everything seems to be every possibility of itself, all at once.
Even the movements of your compatriots seem to trail behind them -
Before you, where once there was a gleaming serpent, stands an impossibly tall woman, in flowing white robes, antler like horns still adorning her head through green-black hair. She is beautiful, seemingly illuminated in her own nimbus of soft light. Her eyes are starry pools, that seem to stretch on through infinity. Her countenance is calm, kind. Her movements belie an impossible grace. She is welcoming. She is utterly terrifying.
"Welcome, Moon-Daughter. Long I have awaited you - it is good to see you whole, again. More so than ever you have been.
(you are yourself, and also every you you have ever been.)
"You have questions, I know. About me, about your task, about your people. About the darkness that faces you and all the world above.
I am called many things - the Dwarves who once lived here called me Yshim-ad-taniin, and long ago the Humans of the south dubbed me Yuhime, which I have taken a liking to. I am the Dragon of Blessed Water, the Lady of Jade. I am one of the last of my kind - perhaps the last, I cannot know. And I am dying."
"I am one of the first-born to being, one of the first of the Ancient's childer given Name. The dragons, as you call them. I was made before death, and so I am broken from your cycle. The shattering, though, greatly wounded my kind. We were made as the protectors of this realm, the stewards of Raen. Whole and a part of the world. But then the world was broken, split in two. And so too were we. The beasts you know as dragon-kind are the children of my broken kin- torn apart from their spirit-selves, shunted fully in to one form. They were given death, and their eternal selves were thrown aside, or festered and succumbed to madness.
"I survived because of this place, and because of the works of spirits and beings from a time before your kenning. This place is one of the few- a wode, a sanctuary. A place where the realms are still whole.
"But the ties that bind this place are crumbling. I may have slipped away already, were it not for your friend above; the driad's tree is a piece of the old world, a cutting from the branch of the World Tree. Her roots hold this place anew, for now.
"This is what happened to your people, as well, Velka Moon-daughter. You came to this world from another that fell to darkness long, long ago... but when this world, too, broke, the river that connected your spirits to that far-off realm slowly dried. The ties remained only due to places like this, and the Raen-stones erected by your people throughout the world. But there are precious few of either left, and so your people are locked here in rigid form, with a wheel of spirits that does not turn.
"If I am to aid you and your people, Velka, as I once did your foremothers, I will need your help. I will need you to buy me a little more time. I have not been above the surface in more than a thousand years, and while this place will not slip away now, if I cannot dance again under sun and moon I will fade away into nothing."
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