Fairspell Meadow trying to find tomorrow and ease in, til you dive in

permission given to watch akashingo <3

four days qiao had staked akashingo, observing the industrious mesa's comings and goings. small little charmspells here and there, whispered against an easterly wind, kept her sharp olive eyes unnoticed as they turned towards the land of eternal sun.

there was not much to see from so far away. qiao was many things, but trespasser came last on the list and only in times of immediate peril. many times over the span of these hours, qiao consulted the skull and her sisters: they insisted a trinket of immense value was somewhere here, hidden under stone and damp earth.

but what? she would ask them, what is it i am looking for? and they would laugh and flit off like the capricious spirits they were, souls beholden to no wills but their own.

they were, after all, ghosts -- and ghosts had their own secret reasons for lingering among the living.

not since her meeting with @Ramesses and his newly acquired mutant had qiao seen the pharoah grace the cold walls to his north. he was either a well-kept king, or an incredibly busy one -- for even in divination, she saw and heard little of him.  this made the seer suspicious: what if he had his own seer, his own wytches? what if the veils she encountered any time she tried to search for evidence of him in the overworld was a ring of protection by hidden sisters working against her?

such thoughts were often easily ran off with -- qiao reminded herself that there were so few of her sisters left in the world, so few, and the ones that lingered on were the ghosts that spent their time bickering amongst themselves, or dropping her scant little tidbits of information as if she were a half-starved mongrel.

as if by an unseen hand, qiao stopped at the boulder where she had first seen the strange creature and the king. some cunning intuition told her this place had significance -- it was here she began to upturn the earth in shallow graves, leaving ugly stains of clay and loam on thin ribbons of snow.